On the guest list

Visiting different hunt country is a surefire way to get the adrenaline racing and to see sport from a new perspective, just be sure to stay on the right side of the secretary

- MADELEINE SILVER

It was out with the Bicester with Whaddon Chase, behind former Joint Master Ian McKie, that Irishman Louis Murphy was faced with a solid wooden gate. “I swear to God, I’ve never been so scared in all my life; if you hit a gate, you and the horse are going to have an unhappy ending,” he recounts with theatrical storytelling. For more than 40 years, Murphy and his brother, Bryan, have lured people to their Dunraven Arms Hotel in County Limerick for hunting holidays, to face the fearsome ditches and drains of the Emerald Isle. But it was on this side of the Irish Sea, in the seemingly tame Home Counties, that he found his nerve wavering. “I love the banks and ditches — the bigger the better — but jumping solid gates onto concrete roads like you do in England frightens the living daylight out of me.”

It is this chance to nudge oneself beyond one’s comfort zone that makes the prospect of visiting a different pack so alluring. “Any visiting day is a memorable day because it’s alien. That’s part of the joy of it,” says Matt Ramsden, Master of the Duke of Beaufort’s, who is inundated with prospective visitors wanting a slice of Gloucestershire and its honey-coloured stone walls. “You meet people that you wouldn’t otherwise come across, find out about other farming practices, what people are doing in that part of the world and what makes that hunt tick. It’s not only about seeing somebody else’s hounds but also a chance to see a different way of doing it. There’s always something you can take from that.”