Alfie

This huntsman's horse had a traumatic start to his career with Gary Thorpe, but turned out to have "the heart of a lion and a proper engine"

- Octavia Pollock

WHEN you’ve just made the most expensive purchase of your life, the last thing you want to find is him caught up in a five-bar gate.

“We’d been parading at Hadleigh show,” says Gary Thorpe, now hunting the Staff College Draghounds. “We hacked back to find he’d tried to jump a very large five-bar gate and got it wrong. He’d managed to put both back legs in and out through the bars.”

Fortunately, at 17.2hh, Alfie could stand on his front legs and, crucially, didn’t panic.

“I got the pistol just in case, then we had to angle grind the gate off his legs. The whole time, he just stood there. Somehow, his legs were fine.”