SOME NOTABLE RUNS 229 



concerning the origin of hare-hunting in the Peak 

 district of Derbyshire, I came, on several occasions, 

 across various references to a certain renowned Squire 

 Frith, who hunted a pack of fine, old-fashioned 

 harriers many years ago in that wild and picturesque 

 district. And, in particular, I found repeated allu- 

 sions to a most memorable hunt which the Squire 

 and his good hounds accomplished. Oral tradition is 

 useful, but it is not always very reliable or very par- 

 ticular in its details. After a good deal of inquiry, I 

 have managed to unearth the details of this great run, 

 partly from the Sporting Magazine of 1826, partly from 

 the accounts procured for me, from oral tradition, by 

 a brother * living in Derbyshire. Squire Frith, of Bank 

 Hall, near Chapel-en-le-Frith, kept harriers for many 

 years in the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth 

 century. He was a very famous old sportsman, who, 

 after fifty years of the chase, was, in the year 1826, 

 still to be seen mounted on a square-built cob, ambling 

 over the fine turf of his native hills with the Buxton 

 harriers, which he gave up in that year. Many a 

 good run had the old gentleman seen with his staunch 

 hounds ; but the finest of all was his great chase of 

 close on forty miles from near Chapel-en-le-Frith to 

 the neighbourhood of Congleton in Cheshire. Squire 

 Frith seems always to have stuck to harriers, but, like 

 many other sportsmen of his time, he hunted an occa- 

 sional fox as well as hare. In December, somewhere 

 about the year 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, 

 by Castle Naze Rocks, not far from Chapel-en-le- 

 Frith. Next morning, December 8, when the Squire 

 turned out with his hounds and field, the frost had 

 * Mr. W. R. Bryden, of Buxton. 



