Blackmore & Sparkford Vale.
23/2/19
Meet: Compton Castle, Somerset.
Incident at St Peter & St Paul’s Church, Charlton Horethorne.
From the meet the hunt moved swiftly in a southerly direction towards Charlton Horethorne. This being the village where the hounds are kennelled.
Around 1:15 pm the hunt could be observed drawing Charlton Gorse to the north east of the village.
From a position near the small Woodland Trust Property in Mount Lane the monitors could view hounds becoming interested in a fox.
This brought the hounds off the ridge and moving towards the village.
Monitors realising the direction of movement took a position within the grounds of St Peter and St Paul’s Church.
At 1:55 pm the hounds were nearing the boundary of the churchyard. The huntsman was using his horn which had the effect of ‘exciting’ the hounds both within the hunt and those in the kennels.
Just before 2:00 pm the hounds ‘picked up’ in the rough to the east of the church and came into churchyard on full cry on the line of the fox.
They ran over the graves to the western boundary of the churchyard.
It was evident the fox was very close as the hounds were ‘screaming’ at this point with some changing their pitch when obviously viewing the fox.
Suddenly monitors who were close to the boundary observed a fleeing vixen exiting the neighbouring property with hounds very close.
She ran back to the rough area bordering the churchyard on the eastern side and was seen disappearing into the undergrowth.
The hounds went in to the left of the undergrowth with the vixen escaping to the right and back momentarily into the churchyard before moving out to a rough area bordering the south of the church.
Here a holler was heard with horn and voice calls being heard.
Two very experienced monitors moved quickly out of the churchyard and moved south and viewed her still running for her life and crossing a public path momentarily in front of the whip.
The whip was left in no uncertain terms as what he should do and in fact he did pull up the hounds.
There followed a conversation between the huntsman and masters who decided to move completely away from the area.
Without doubt they would have known we had video of the incident and this likely played a part in their decision.
This beautiful fox lives on.Monitors sought advice from an experienced animal rescue centre and we now strongly suspect the vixen had not long given birth. Hopefully she made it back to her earth and both she and her cubs are safe. We find it astonishing that hunters continue to hunt foxes at this time of the year or indeed at all.