The wily character of a Lakeland huntsman
Last updated 05:39, Friday, 15 August 2008
Willie Irving: Terrierman, Huntsman and Lakelander by Sean Frain (Merlin Unwin Books, £17.99)It is very difficult for a non-huntsman to appreciate how deeply the passion for hunting runs in the veins of the true huntsman. It is not simply a question of an occasional canter across the fells with a pack of attentive yapping hounds and a dozen men or more on horses in pursuit of a defenceless fox.
It is a whole way of life ingrained in the ways of the community. It has a strong sense of being part of nature, acknowledging the natural rhythm of the seasons, feeling at one with the wild life and the countryside.
The life of Willie Irving, huntsman extraordinary, long-time master of the famous Melbreak Foxhounds and all-round sportsman, is a fine example of this commitment.
He was born into hunting, in Ennerdale in 1898, the son of a farmer and huntsman, another Willie Irving, and his whole life revolved around the sport.
He became huntsman for the Melbreak Foxhounds when he was 28, at about the same time that he married.
We’re told that Willie and Maud were living in the huntsman’s cottage at High Thrushbank, near Loweswater, “when they had their first child, also named Maud, on September 15, 1926, the very same day as witnessed Irving as newly appointed huntsman, account for a fox with his terriers in a drain at Rogerscale”.
Life and hunting ran side by side, the calendar of his life was recorded alongside memorable chases and kills.
The fox is always Reynard, a wily antagonist, giving the hunt a good run and often outwitting it at the very end. But the fox is also a threat to the farmer’s livelihood, worrying the sheep and killing the lambs. It might be controlled by poisons or shooting, but the huntsmen, the very men intent on killing the fox, would also rear orphaned fox cubs (to sell on to restock areas where the fox had disappeared).
Sometimes the fox escaped. On January 15, 1931, they ran a fox to earth in a drain at Isel Gate but, since it was in West Cumberland Hounds’ country, “Willie decided to do the right thing and left it to ground unmolested.” Two months later one lot of hounds “holed a fox at Black Crag and Tommy Swinburn’s young terrier succeeded in bolting it, but it finally ran hounds off and so retained its brush”.
Another day, on Beech Hill, “a cur dog ran their fox and killed it before hounds reached the spot”.
In the early Thirties Willie bred one of the “gamest and most typey’ of terriers ever to serve a fell pack. Turk of Melbreak was one of the ‘new’ breed of Lakeland terrier and he was born on January 30, 1930, after Willie had put Rex of Melbreak to his bitch, Nettle”. Turk was “a finder, a stayer and a dog that could finish a reluctant fox that had got itself into a commanding position inside a borran earth”.
The hunt could be an exciting, dangerous and colourful spectacle. One hound, Charlie, fell 70 or 80ft of sheer drop down a rock-face, picked itself up, and carried on joining the other hounds streaming down the face of the crag after the fox. This time Reynard dived underneath a huge boulder and crept well away from the hounds: “However, Whisk and Wasp, incredibly game and capable tykes, were there and Willey loosed them into the earth. They soon located the skulking fox and finished him below ground as Willie dug to them.”
Willie’s last hunting season was in 1950 when he took the hard decision to leave the hounds and the hunt that had been his life and become full-time secretary of the Hound Trails Association.
Lakeland country life was bred in Willie Irving’s bones and we are unlikely to see his like again. However, we still have photographs of him walking through Cockermouth with his pack of hounds and standing in the heart of the fells dressed in his huntsman’s clothes and we still have Billy Wilkinson’s splendid cartoon of him displaying a dead fox to his yapping hounds.
Now we have this book, culled mostly from the detailed diary entries Willie kept of his hunting career. Much of it will seem repetitive to the layman, but it is the very detail that reveals the man’s obsessive passion for his home country and, of course, for old Reynard.
