WHIPPING-IN THE RIGHT WORDS
“SNOW and sleet and driven storm were now full in our faces… I could have laughed aloud, for the pace and the fun and the novelty, till I saw something bigger and uglier that I had ever seen before. And a man riding at it, too! The ditch seemed boundless, the bank was as the Great Wall of China, yet there was Mr Gore and his chestnut flinging upward and into it, and pinned to its side like a fly to a window-pane, till the mare drew herself foot after foot to the summit.”
This was how the great 19th-century hunting correspondent Edward Pennell-Elmhirst, who wrote for The Field under his pen name of Brooksby, described a blistering day with the Ward Union Hunt in Ireland. With its vivid language, adren-aline-inducing drama and acute sense of humour, Brooksby’s writing transports us in an instant to the snow-swept fields of 19thcentury Ireland, where we too can imagine ourselves facing the gargantuan banks
Nearly a century later, another hunting correspondent, Michael Clayton, transports us into the midst of a day with the Quorn with the same panache: “Those who made the hack back to Walton Thorns for the last draw were indeed rewarded.
