CHAPTER IX BANKS AND DITCHES Make me feel the wild pulsation I have often felt before, Yearning for the large excitement that the coming sport should yield, Ha, ha, ha! was that an oxer? What, old Rambler, is he dead? THERE is very little to be said about the Buckinghamshire side of the Queen's country. It is a land of large undulations, light-coloured plough, beech-woods, and flints. Here and there in the valleys a narrow tract of permanent pasture cheers you up, and fills another corner in the sketch-book of memory. I saw the body of the pack carry a rare head up the emerald stream line of the Amersham Valley one day, with a hound called Splendour three hundred yards in front of them all-we could never make out where or how he had got such a lead. But it cannot be considered a good hunting country from a riding point of view. In old days the Queen's Hounds used sometimes to run down into the Vale of Aylesbury from Gerrard's Cross-at least, so the late William Bartlett, for many years second whip, used to tell me. or other of our Nestors used always to remark to me—it was the veteran commonplace of this particular meet-that the wind, whatever its quarter, was right for taking us thither. But, alas! it never did so in my time. At the same time, all about Gerrard's Cross and Beaconsfield is not by any means a bad stag-hunting country. At all events there is One lots of room, and we had some capital gallops in that part of the world. When there had been plenty of rain these pale ploughs and the high beech-woods carried a capital scent, and the configuration of the country wanted a galloping horse; indeed a better bred one than Berkshire. The best thing I remember was fifty minutes from Chalfont Park with an outlying deer, named Bramshill. We found him in a large patch of broom, just above Captain Penton's house, where he had been treated for two or three weeks as an honoured guest. Harvey drew up to him very quietly and slowly, and the hounds had owned a line for three hundred yards before the deer jumped up. This was a very pretty find; the deer jumped with such gay bounds through the broom. I was riding a mare called Milkmaid, not up to my weight, but she was all but cleanbred and fast, and carried me well. I don't think I ever remember going for so long at top speed. Comparatively few people really lived through it or saw it. As there was nothing to jump all the way, there is no harm in saying so; it was more like a flat race. Bramshill took to the reservoir at Chalfont St. Giles, and we had to leave him there. This deer was a great water lover. We had taken him in a pond at Elvetham the first day he was ever hunted. The following year I took him down to the Vine, where we hunted one day by invitation, thinking we were safe in that dry and waterless country, but he found his way straight to the only ornamental piece of water for miles, Ewhurst Park, and he again refused to come out. There were several good riders who used to come out on the Bucks side of the river, most notably Mr. Drake, the rector of Amersham, who joined us once or twice. Except for the Rev. Mr. Fowle, whom George III., on a public occasion, declared to be one of the best cavalry officers (Mr. Fowle having at the time of the French Wars raised a corps of Berkshire Yeomanry), one of the best riders, and also one of the best preachers of his acquaintance, and whom he much wished to make a bishop, the Royal Hounds do not appear to have ever been distinguished for any of the hard-riding parsons. who adorn the sporting literature of fifty years ago. A writer of authority in the early years of this century declares that he would back the bench of Bishops against the Judges any day over a country or on the flat, and the pages of Nimrod' teem with the exploits of resolute clergymen, who seem to have been especial favourites, and to have often attracted distinguished and particular notice. Thus, the Rev. J. M.,' writes the Duke of Cleveland in his diary, 'shone as conspicuously on his grey mare as in the pulpit, and was alone with hounds over Ainderby Moors.' Again, The Vicar of P. is no humbug,' writes 'Nimrod.' This satisfactory conclusion was due to the Vicar's love of hunting, and to the sporting character of his invitation to the writer and Sir Bellingham Graham to drink more claret. If you drink enough, it will make your eyes look like boiled gooseberries.' The first time I saw Mr. Drake out we happened to run fast over half a dozen old grass fields with rough, old-fashioned fences. This was quite at the beginning of the run, and we were all full of go. As I watched the 'seriously dressed' horseman smoothly cutting out the work for us on a well-bred old chestnut horse, I knew at once we were entertaining an angel unawares. Perhaps Mr. Drake would have come out oftener, had he known the pleasure and interest his style of riding gave us all. 6 Whether hounds run fast over it or slow, Bucks is not at all a bad country to give a horse confidence; the neat wattles are encouraging to a degree, and here and there a sort of fringe of young and innocent hazel, with no ditch, teaches a horse to get up. As far as I remember, the only time I saw a bona fide upstanding gate jumped by one of the Queen's field was on the Bucks side. Mr. Shackle of Redleaf was the hero of this incident, on a well-bred black horse he owned in 1892. It was charmingly done, and the black horse landed noiselessly on his hind legs on to a rough service roadway leading into some farm buildings. I nearly Absalomised myself by jumping the fence alongside into an orchard with apple-trees of the most gnarled and deformed description. The gate, too, was new, painted black; the next worst colour to white. The Slough country, with its once popular meets, I consider quite unsuitable to stag-hunting; it is distinguished by almost every characteristic you don't want-population, wire, a river, a canal, a railway, cabbages, strong wheat land, and soggy grass with a black subsoil. The opening meet at Salt Hill is one of those institutions which can no longer be defended in practice. In 1893, I remember, we spent the whole of our time-it seemed very long-crossing and recrossing the river by Maidenhead Bridge, finally taking the deer in Weston's yard before a large assembly of Eton boys and maidservants. It was stag-hunting at its very worst. Indeed, I have often thought the best thing about these teeming flats between Bray and Windsor-which I admit sometimes carried a scent--were the varying prospects of Windsor, rising like an enchanted castle into the clearer sky out of the lilac-blue haze which broods upon the low horizons of the Thames Valley. Often and often I have thanked Windsor with loyal satisfaction for that stately outline of towers and terraces, and felt compensated for a stupid hunt. But now let me take my readers to the banks and ditches of Berkshire. Most of the glad emotions so pleasantly recalled to us by Mr. Bromley-Davenport in the couplets quoted at the head of this chapter, are to be had for the asking by the stag-hunter; indeed, if there is a scent and the Queen's field are in the humour-which, to do them justice, they invariably are-and if the deer goes the right way from Hawthorn Hill, it is very possible to rejoice in your cropper at the first fence which happens to be a very typical example of the Queen's bank and ditch country. There are no oxers-nor need this be a matter of inextinguishable regret-and very little timber. Mr. Van de Weyer's fine grass land around New Lodge was fenced with rood upon rood of uniform post and railings, but I do not think I can remember seeing them jumped. One day when we nearly ran straight over this bit of country, I thought of doing it, but there it ended. The rails are not very high, but they are painted black, and they stand up out of the level fields with horrid integrity without a suspicion of a lean from you. The geometry of their alignments gives the whole affair a building-plot look; and in bold relief several hunting gates are painted a staring white, and open easily and quickly. It requires moral as well as physical courage to resist such a conspiracy. A sporting doctor was the only conspicuous exponent in my time of timber jumping. He had a white horse and a bay horse, which like himself were both highly versed in the art, but he literally had to hunt for opportunities of exhibiting their talents. There is no water either in the Berkshire side of the Queen's country; that is, no jumpable water. The not-to-be denied stag-hunter will have frequent opportunities of swimming if so minded, but very few of pounding the field over a bumping brook. Take them all through, the fences are mostly of the deferential breed; you seldom come to the sort of place which Jem Mason described as comprising eternal misery on one side and certain death on the other; or of the character so neatly suggested by a hard-riding nobleman to his huntsman: What's the other side, my Lord? Thank God, I am.' |