Riding the high moor

Once a year, the Two Bridges Hunt Club unites the four hunts that call Dartmoor home, for dinner and a day’s challenging sport

- ADRIAN DANGAR

Founded by the Dartmoor hunting community in 1929 to reciprocate Edward, Prince of Wales’s hospitality at nearby Prince Hall, the Two Bridges Hunt Club has grown into something of an institution for those who ride to hounds on Dartmoor. The club takes its name from a moorland outpost that stands beside the old turnpike road across Dartmoor downstream of the West Dart’s confluence with the River Cowsic. Membership is limited to a hundred individuals, drawn from subscribers to the four moorland packs that hunt the 450 square miles of high, wild country between Okehampton in the north and Ivybridge in the south, together with members of the Royal Navy Saddle Club, but all must be (or perhaps must have been) capable of ‘riding the high moor’. This qualification may sound innocuous but it takes a special skill to keep in touch with hounds when they race across terrain strewn with lumps of broken granite and quaking peat bogs.