A day to remember

American foxhounds fly with a “ferocity of pace” hot on the heels of a coyote, as only the boldest of Bull Run followers manage to keep up with the action

- LIAM CLANCY

Bull Run, Cedar Mountain, Virginia, USA

VIRGINIA feels like the place where good foxhunters go when they die. It is a landscape of expansive wind-bleached fields, rolling up to brown wooded hills, with the calm bulk of the Blue Ridge mountains along the western horizon. Every fenceline seems to have an inviting hunt jump (a chicken coop, in the local parlance) built into it.

The pretty town of Middleburg could be considered the epicentre of Virginia hunting, surrounded as it is by fashionable packs like the Orange County, the Piedmont and the Middleburg Hunt.

The depth of wealth here is almost inconceivable. Many farms are bought as tax write-offs, or for the status that land ownership in the Piedmont confers upon the owner. The famous Orange County Hunt, arguably America’s most prestigious pack, requires that members own at least 50 acres of property which can be fairly hunted; otherwise they must pay an entrance fee of $250,000.

Such a mentality does little to promote the view of foxhunting as an egalitarian pastime, but there is no doubt that the region’s hunting landowners have been instrumental in hindering the westward spread of development from Washington DC. Without them, the existence of the fields and woods so abundant in wildlife would be seriously threatened.

ADMIRABLE HOUNDS

MY day in Virginia was with the Bull Run Hunt, from their kennels near Cedar Mountain, an hour south of Middleburg. The land here in Culpeper County obviously consists of working farms, and while the huge trucks and gooseneck horse trailers so characteristic of American hunting were much in evidence at the meet, they were not perhaps all as new and pristine as they might have been at a meet of the Middleburg or the Piedmont.