The Hunt meet today was at Famington Farm (Barcheston) and what a day – it was absolutely chucking it down! Chris still came with the dogs to see me off at the meet though. Famington Farm was beautiful, Cotswold Stone buildings within a fabulous square covered with yellow stone-chip. There was a good turn out at the meet – about 30 in the field, but they soon dwindled.
The rain was relentless, and the wind was biting, which meant that the going was pretty mucky. I met Keith Arnold (Hunt Secretary) on the hack down to the meet, which was lucky and Keith introduced me to the Field master (Sam), I commented that I expected mainly road work and he gave me a smile and said “we’ll see”. It turned out that we did more jumping in the couple of hours I was out with them, that We’d had all season!
The jumping was great, we jumped our first hedges and a stile in a little dip – which had lots of stoppers – but Finn just sailed it, there were lots of hunt jumps too. Finn felt really happy in her jumping and was totally up for it today, she was still pulling at 1pm when I said goodnight. The ground was getting heavier and I didn’t want to risk an injury, despite Finn not feeling the consequences of the going at all. There were about 6 still out when I left, and I understand from Keith that they packed up about 20 minutes later anyway.
By the time I’d got Finn home and settled I was absolutely freezing – but Chris had run a bath for me and poured me a nice brandy to drink whilst I was soaking – nice end to the day.
P.S. It took over a week for my hunting coat and boots to dry out!