The cycle begins

Though it may lie forgotten for much of the year, the kennel bicycle is indispensable in summer when hound exercise gets under way

- Tessa Waugh

IT IS ONE of the more romantic sights of summer: two slow-moving bicycles ridden by men in brown coats and flat caps with a pack of hounds happily clustered around the wheels. In busy areas, you might pinch yourself thinking that you have blundered on to a film set or that one of Daniel Crane's paintings had been brought to life. The scene radiates contentment: hounds with sterns aloft, people calmly pedalling. The pack move across as one at a single command, and anyone who has struggled to control a lone dog might marvel at the manoeuvre and the quiet way in which it is conducted. To the modern eye, more used to seeing bikes in the context of skinny rumps in Lycra, it could be a scene from another time.

In the days when hunt kennels bustled with grooms and staff for every eventuality, horses were used for hound exercise. Cobs in the main were brought out for the early days at the start of the summer before being replaced by hunters midway through autumn hunting. From the Second World War onwards staff numbers slimmed and it was then that bicycles came into regular use as a low-maintenance alternative for hound exercise. Ever since, they have been an often-neglected but nonetheless essential part of kennel life. For most of the year, while a well-run hunt kennel moves along military lines, the bicycles tend to be flung against a wall. Blink and you miss an unprepossessing tangle of metal festooned with cobwebs lurking somewhere in a dusty corner. Here they stay pretty much ignored, until they are dragged out at the beginning of the summer to play a crucial role in getting hounds fit. Each huntsman will have a slightly different formula for this but for most the bicycle is at the core.