A fresh feel and high spirits

Oliver Townend gets a taste of what it’s like at the sharp end of hunting when he visits his local pack, the Wynnstay

- Catherine Austen

IF you’d asked me whether I wanted to jump an upright, hanging metal gate off an angle onto the road on a horse I’d never sat on before, at the end of January in an Olympic year with the start of the eventing season just five weeks away, the short answer would have been, ‘Obviously not’.

But Henry Bailey, jointmaster and huntsman of the Wynnstay had done so – and I was up front with him, hounds were hunting, so over we went. It wasn’t the first or last gate we’d jump that day; He seems to like jumping gates nearly as much as he loves his hounds.

He explained that, as he likes his field master to have the field as close as possible, if he stopped to undo the gates, it would interrupt the flow of the day and slow things up.

It’s a fair point, and to me it says two things: one, that confidence, enthusiasm and spirits are at a real high here, as everyone follows him over. And two, that his grey horse, which he had first, is one of the best horses at his job that I have ever seen in any discipline.

I’ve ridden horses with less ability round Badminton and Burghley and I was impressed to hear that he’s now 16 and Henry bought him as a fouryear-old in Ireland.

“I couldn’t ride one side of him for the first year, but he’s my boy; I’d do anything for that horse,” he told me.

IN THE BACKGROUND

HUNTING has been in the background of my life at various points, but never at the forefront. I was based in Leicestershire at the start of my career at Kenneth Clawson’s in the Atherstone country. When I set up on my own, I lived at Lubenham Lodge in the middle of the Fernie country, next to the hunt’s most famous coverts, John Ball and Jane Ball.