2o8 The Chase 



The Longest Run ? <o -<:> m^> 



SQUIRE FRITH, of Bank Hall, near Chapel- 

 en-le-P rith, kept harriers for many years in the 

 eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. 

 He was a very famous old sportsman, who, after 

 fifty years of the chase, was in 1826 still to be seen 

 mounted on a square-built cob, ambling over the 

 fine turf of his native hills with the Buxton 

 Harriers. ... In December, somewhere about 

 1786, word came to the Squire that a fox had 

 been marked to earth and " made in " as they call 

 it up north near a cottage called Hole House, not 

 far from Chapel-en-le-Frith. Next morning, when 

 the Squire turned out with his hounds and field, 

 the frost had rendered the ground much fitter for 

 foot-work than for hunting a fox over the rugged 

 and steep moorlands and through the rocky dales 

 of North Derbyshire. All the earth round had 

 been stopped, and the fox was duly unkennelled 

 and the pack laid on. As sometimes happens in 

 frost there was a ravishing scent, and a marvellous 

 chase ensued. The fox took them by Taxal, near 

 Whaley Bridge, over the Duke of Devonshire's 

 moors, skirting Axe Edge, the highest range in the 

 county, on to Macclesfield Forest : thence by Tag- 

 sneys, Crookward, and Langly and Gracely Woods, 

 to Swithingly, where they sustained a short check. 

 Hitting off the line again they followed him to 

 Horsly and Gawsworth, and finally ran into and 

 killed this wonderfully stout fox at Clouds Hill, 

 near Congleton. The fox had stood up before 

 his pursuers for just under forty miles. The horses 

 got their riders back as far as the Cat and Fiddle 

 Inn on Axe Edge, the highest inn in England, but 

 were so beaten that they had to be left there for 



