After a week of no hunting, Stevenstone were back out on Saturday, meeting at Five Lanes Cross near Abbots Bickington. So desperate are this hunt for followers that they even invited local violent thug Anthony Hemmings back out to join them.
They did a counter-clockwise loop around Abbots Bickington, starting in the valley south of Court Barton, then via Broomball Wood towards Gardenclose Wood and finishing in the large patch of public access scrubland at Barton Cottage.
A fox was seen early on, running from hounds. Sabs were well-positioned to cover the fox’s line before hounds arrived. Deer were seen bolting in all directions as well, and shortly before the hunt finished, hounds bolted and chased a roe deer for an extended period near the meet. The terrified deer managed to escape, but not before crashing repeatedly into a barbed wire fence in panic. The whole ordeal was captured on film by our drone, while foot sabs ran in to stop the hounds. Huntsman Stephen James meanwhile was stuck on foot in the boggy scrubland and didn’t intervene. As you’ll see from our footage (to follow), this is clearly the kind of place where foxes, deer and other wildlife would lie up and not somewhere anyone could ever lay a trail, so what were the hunt doing in there in the first place? Rhetorical question.
Stephen James had barely managed to stay afloat as he waded through the bog. He called an early finish at this point, citing a bad back, probably incurred minutes earlier while attempting to mount his horse in a dense wooded area. Our footage shows him get on, disappear briefly behind a tree and then reappear seconds later on the ground, upside down like a startled beetle.
We watched the hunt pack up and then headed off to find the Torrington Farmers Hunt, who were meeting at Ham Farm near Alverdiscott. We found them in the vicinity of Glass Water Bridge and upon seeing us they instantly made a beeline back to the meet, where they packed up nice and early.
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