EARLY HISTORY OF THE BUNT. 19 



Wood ; and in what is now known as the Thursday 

 country, Sir Thomas Slingsby kept hounds and hunted the 

 Goldsboroush district, so that before the formation of their 

 own hunt, the residents in the York and Ainsty country 

 got plenty of hunting. 



It would perhaps be scarcely accurate to say that in 

 those days York was a hunting centre, yet that a few people 

 came to York for the sake of the hunting is not only possible 

 but highly probable, and we know that such was the case 

 a very few years after the formation of the York and Ainsty 

 pack. For York had a pack of hounds of her own even in 

 those days, a pack which doubtless showed excellent sport, 

 and which had, moreover, a long and doubtless interesting 

 history, could it be discovered. This was the York City 

 Harriers, who, in their later days, were kennelled at the 

 Brown Cow, a hostelry long since done away with, and which 

 was situated close to or on the site of the old railway station. 

 Curiously enough, there is no record of this pack, of the 

 masters or the huntsmen, or of the sport which they showed. 

 But one thing is certain, and that is, that when they were 

 given up and sold in 1830, they had been in existence for 

 upwards of a century. The late Colonel Telford's stud- 

 groom, whom many of my readers will remember, was in 

 his early days whipper-in to the pack, which not only 

 hunted hare, but occasionally had a turn with a fo.x if they 

 came across one. 



The Hambleton foxes were rattled by Colonel Thornton, 

 whose hounds .seem to have achieved a well-merited repu- 

 tation, but the country which he hunted is now im- 

 possible to define exactly. He seems to have been some- 

 what of a bird of passage as regarded his sporting exploits. 

 It need scarcely be pointed out that the York and Ainsty 

 do not hunt the Hambleton district now, though they 

 occasionally run there, and some of their best runs of recent 



