1863-1913
by Ron Black

The book is no longer in print but the ebook is available from : Amazon : Smashwords : and all major ebook retailers.

Introduction

A low cloud base hung over the top of the crag, masking it from view. From this cloud a gentle light rain fell, insidiously, the type you don’t notice as it seeps through your clothing until you are soaked to the skin. The overhang of the crag under which I sat went some way to give a degree of protection from the rain but it was not total and my clothing was gradually losing the battle to keep me dry. A few feet below and to my right the sound of metal on rock denoted another boulder would soon be joining several more which had already been rolled down the steep boulder field below the borran.

It had been all so different last week; I’d left home just after lunch and walked up the Scandal valley up onto Little Hart Crag, from there I’d contoured in until I arrived above the series of borrans which lie in the boulder field under Dove Crag. I’d got myself comfortable in among the rocks, taken out the binoculars and settled down to wait. The afternoon wore on and the sun began to lower in the cloudless blue sky, shadows began to lengthen and the temperature began to fall. I was all for giving up and starting the long walk home, when a movement in the rocks some distance below caught my attention. The fox stood up and lazily stretched, after a shake and a good look around, it descended the boulder field and crossing the dilapidated wall at its base in a leap and disappeared into the bracken beds beside the stream flowing down towards the valley some thousand feet below.

“That bugger was up to no good,” said my father over a rather late dinner that evening. ”Did you look around the borran?” I took a mouthful of tea, and swallowed, “No kept away,” I said. “Fox dropped in-bank towards Deepdale Hall, I heard they have been losing lambs.”

And this was how I came to renew my family’s acquaintance with the Ullswater Foxhounds that morning; we go back over a hundred years, starting with Great Uncle Braithwaite “Brait” Black who hunted and drank with Bowman, starting around 1906; moving on to the 1950s George “Geordie” was whipper-in to the great Joe Wear for some 15 or more seasons and then my father and I.

The story of the Ullswater Foxhounds formation and early years was covered by Skelton in his Reminiscences of Joe Bowman written in 1921. Whilst this book does not seek to compete with probably the greatest factual book ever written on foxhunting in the English Lake District it perhaps, with the usage of newspaper and other reports written at the time, adds to the story.