Mike Felton

One of the country’s most experienced masters, Mike Felton is an integral part of the Blackmore and Sparkford Vale. Tessa Waugh meets him

- Tessa Waugh

THERE are very few MFHs who have been at the helm of the same pack since the 1990s. Plenty of people hunting now were not even born then. Many more will look back on the period pre-ban and feel that times have changed for the worse.

Mike Felton, who joined the mastership of the Blackmore and Sparkford Vale (BV) in 1992, has spanned both periods without a backward glance.

We are speaking via Zoom but you still get a sense of his character; a man of action, not prone to pessimism or fusty reminiscing about what once was. He has retained his enthusiasm for hunting in Dorset throughout this period and continues to look forward positively. Some might say that this is because the BV country is not troubled by many of the issues facing other hunts; it is still very rural and shooting is not the blight that it is elsewhere.

The running of the hunt has remained the same since his early days, divided up into three areas north, south and middle. Mike has always run the middle area.

“Each area has a fantastic bit as well as more peripheral bits,” he enthuses, “and the farming and landowner support has been amazing.”

Of the elements that have altered, he says, “there are fewer dairy farms now, and the ones that are left have got bigger, but we still have an awful lot of them. There is more maize now than when I started, and the constituents of the field have changed three times in my tenure – we have more indigenous than London people hunting with us now.”

CATCHING THE BUG