Hunting's past, present and future

Members of the RS Surtees Society join the Fitzwilliam (Milton) for a weekend of sport and hospitality of the kind so admired by the 19th-century's pre-eminent hunting novelist

- Rory Knight Bruce

BETWEEN the honey-stoned town of Stamford in Lincolnshire and the more modern purlieus of Peterborough are two significant estates. The one, Burghley House, has the world-famous horse trials and the other, Milton Park, has been home to the Fitzwilliam foxhounds, known as the Fitzwilliam (Milton), and the descendent family the Naylor-Leylands since before their records began in 1760. In between is the small thatched cottage at Helpston once home to the 19th-century farm-labourer poet John Clare, a tenant of the Fitzwilliam's, known in Jonathan Bate's superb biography as 'the poet's poet'.

It was to Milton that the colourful and cheerful RS Surtees Society members, both mounted and on foot, were invited for a February weekend hosted by owners and Fitzwilliam Joint Masters Sir Philip and Lady Isabella Naylor-Leyland. The modern English hounds, with a touch of United Pack fell blood, have always been kennelled within the 759 acres of verdant parkland of this immaculate estate, which comprises more than 20,000 acres of arable and 1,750 acres of laid-out coppices and woodland. The hunting country stretches from Stamford in the north to Higham Ferrers in the south and east on to the Cambridgeshire Fens, offering two days a week in the Season.