For the second time in a week, Eggesford Hunt returned to Hatherleigh to terrorise wildlife on the County Wildlife Site at Hatherleigh Moor and the surrounding area. This is usually their annual Hatherleigh Carnival meet, and although the carnival committee have finally decided that inviting wildlife criminals to their event isn’t a good look, the hunt still meet in the town square outside the George Inn on carnival day. Based on the conversations we had with locals all around Hatherleigh Moor, most Hatherleigh residents are utterly fed up of the hunt’s presence.
The first hour was spent on the moor, with huntsman Jason Marles casting hounds into very dense covert, exactly the kinds of places where foxes would lie up. You can see several examples of this in our drone shots. Fortunately hounds mostly kept drawing a blank until they got to the edge of the moor at Deckport Farm, where they chased a fox south to Merryland Stream and Becka Moor.
With hounds running ahead in cry, Jason galloped past one of our foot teams on the moor and shouted “that rabbit’s a runner”. Remember this is a hunt that don’t bother with the pretense of trail-hunting. They blatantly hunt foxes and have several criminal convictions and cautions for digging foxes out of badger setts. ‘Rabbit-hunting’ is about as plausible a ruse as trail-hunting is (i.e. completely implausible) and still illegal if done on land without the landowner’s permission. The speed at which Jason and his lackeys were trying to gather hounds back to them north of Becka Moor leads us to suspect they probably didn’t have permission to be on that land!
The next few hours were spent around Broomford Manor, one of Eggesford’s favourite spots. Our drone hovered over the woods, spotting foxes and deer as they fled into the surrounding fields and communicating their location to our foot teams on the ground. The hunt eventually moved south to another patch of dense covert around Teachmore Farm before returning to Broomford via Combe. Having not had much luck with the foxes so far, terrier boy Tom Bounsall tried to show off to his new love interest Jade and the group of kids on horses nearby by driving his quadbike at sabs at high speed across the field, narrowly avoiding causing a serious collision.
The hunt returned to Hatherleigh Moor for the last part of the day, although only briefly drawing coverts on the moor itself before heading north and into the woods between Brook’s Moorhead and Fishleigh Castle. Foot sabs were in the right place to cover the scent of a very tired-looking fox who was desperately trying to outrun the hounds. A few minutes later, possibly the same fox was seen by our drone and again managed to escape the pack despite huntsman Jason Marles deliberately putting hounds on their line. Via Fishleigh Downs and Lake the hunt finally headed back towards their vehicles at Ian Balsdon’s Reed Farm, but not before causing chaos in the farmyard around Risdon’s Fishleigh, where hounds rampaged through the paddocks, terrorising resident animals. Jason’s poor horse also didn’t look too comfortable by the end of the day.
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