The aristo-ratters

It was once a celebrity accessory but, through the hard work of Harry Parsons, the Sealyham has become a formidable rat hunter again

- PATRICK GALBRAITH

Harry Parsons, an old hunting whip in hand and an expression of hard-earned contentment on his face, stood in the brilliant winter sun, watching Britain’s most venerable pack of rat hunters running to and fro outside the thatched keeper’s cottage.

“The aristocrats of the terrier world,” he said to no one in particular with a satisfied smile. At which point, inevitably, one of them got stuck on the middle of a cattle grid. “They’re not used to those,” he shouted to Adrian Flowers, a Sealyham owner from Oxfordshire, who was scooping the dog up to carry it to safety.

Calling the dogs to him like a well-drilled pack of hounds, Harry addressed the field, telling us the day wasn’t going to be about numbers. He was there to show some fine rat hunting, against the glorious backdrop of the 13,000-acre Burghley estate. As we set off to draw the first covert — a maize strip on the edge of one of the Burghley shoot’s parkland drives — it struck me that there is no merrier crowd than those hunting on a Monday morning, happily aware that the rest of the world is at work.

“They’ll take about an hour to settle down,” Harry said as the dogs ran in and out of the crop with their noses to the ground. In between calling back Arthur, who seemed to be particularly free-spirited, Harry recounted his journey to becoming one of the biggest names in the modern terrier world.

In the late 1980s, he suddenly realised that the Sealyham was in dire straits. “There were only 43 puppies registered the year I started,” he reflected. “A long way off the 300 you need to sustain a breed.”

Drastically, Harry sold his business and used the time and capital it freed up to try to restore the Sealyham to its former glory. His first dog was a bitch called Alice that came from a farmer in Wales.

Promising