From the field Coping with a curtailed season

In the face of an abruptly curtailed season – at least for the foreseeable future – Catherine Austen ponders alternative options and the likelihood of morphing into Isabell Werth

THAT’S it then. Back to lockdown. I hope you made the most of autumn hunting, and we need to be grateful that we got that. It should have helped put a little back in the badly depleted hunt coffers – and on that note, I seriously hope you have paid your subscriptions. Obviously hounds and horses need to continue to be fed and looked after, and staff need paying to do so, and any regular hunting person who shirks paying their dues right now should be ashamed of themselves.

I’ve managed 20 days’ hunting in the past two months and while I very much hope we get more in due course, I am so glad I made the effort. For me, the whole point of having a horse is to go hunting. Yes, I am hunting editor of this magazine and so the boundaries between work and personal life are blurred (or don’t exist), but those autumn and winter days with hounds are why I work flat out on virtually every day of the year that I am not hunting, and often in the evenings of those days, too.

This is not an “I work so hard” moan – thousands of other people do exactly the same to be able to afford to go hunting. It is our social life, our exercise, our downtime and the way we connect with our locality, both people and landscape.

Of course I enjoy riding; perhaps not the early, plonking weeks of roadwork, but certainly the jumping and the flatwork, the happy hacks with friends that turn into

“Shall we just pop this rail… and that wall?”

But I do all that because I want my hunter to be well-schooled, supple, fit and wellprepared for the sort of busy hunting I want to do. It is the road that leads to hunting, not a destination in itself. Would I keep a horse if there was no hunting? I don’t know. I certainly would keep Flynn and I’d find things to do with him – he’s sweet and quite capable of turning his hoof to anything – but I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t get another one after him. Unless, that is, my resolution to do “no stirrups November” and seriously improve my riding on the flat and my fitness during the next few weeks turns me into Isabell Werth. Unlikely, I know, but this is a pretty unlikely year.

THINKING of other equestrian activities, my friend the lady master and I found ourselves in the warm-up area for our local hunter trial the other day, asking each other what the hell we were doing.

The pairs class on our handsome matching greys had seemed like a great idea after a few glasses of wine some time before; now we were in the sort of spotlight that AP McCoy must have found himself in when he had ridden in the Grand National 14 times without winning it. Hunter trial fences “in our day” were made of sticks, logs and the odd hedge. This was like the grassroots championship at Badminton. Our arrogant plans to win – why else would we go? – vanished; we just hoped we’d get round.

We knew literally everyone there, it was clearly the worst idea we had ever had and even the churning in our stomachs (which might have had something to do with the night before) and the whirring in our ears couldn’t drown out the delight in the commentators’ voices. There was nothing for it – we had to go round flat out, in the hope that our hunters wouldn’t have time to notice the highly coloured and decorated fences and spook at them. All attempts at style were sacrificed for speed.

This plan actually worked and we bombed round; my delightfully well-behaved new horse got very enthusiastic and pulled my arms out behind the lady master’s ex-racehorse. Humiliation avoided; we went far too fast to win, but better that way than the other. However, if we ever do a hunter trial again, we are going a long, long way from home. Maybe Northumberland.

See you on the other side – with stomach muscles of steel. Possibly.