HUNTS AND THEIR HISTORY 179 



In the early days of the hunt the kennels and the 

 headquarters of the Hunt Club were at Stratford-on- 

 Avon, which is situated in the least attractive part 

 of the country from a riding point of view. This 

 side of the country is separated from the rest by 

 the river Avon, and has much plough and a wide 

 extent of woodland. But those who, like the writer, 

 have ridden over Oxfordshire plough and formed 

 their ideas from that, will not find the arable lands of 

 Warwickshire so formidable as they might expect. 

 These ploughs do not carry a bad scent and do not 

 hold the horse in the same way that the sticky fallows 

 of Oxfordshire or parts of Lincolnshire do. The 

 fixtures, then, on the Stratford-on-Avon side should 

 not be neglected, though it is a better country to begin 

 the day, on a fresh horse, than to finish, on a 

 tired one. The foxes are stout, and it is possible — 

 Nimrod says it was a frequent occurrence in his time — 

 to run right away to the Pytchley borders and thus 

 to be in a grass country most of the way. 



This, of course, means a very long point, such as 

 foxes do not often make in these days. Nor were 

 such distances probably ever very common. True, 

 Nimrod sketches an imaginary run from one of the 

 coverts at Charlecote to Wormleighton by way of 

 Kineton, Geydon, Chesterton, Tedington, Upton, 

 Ladbrook and Southam, a line then, as now, chiefly 

 over grass with strong, but fair, fences and no river, 

 but nowadays there is a railway, the Birmingham 

 and Oxford line of the G. W. R. The fine woodland 

 country on the west is rather out of the range of 

 territory included in this book. On the Shepston 

 side again is a pleasant district, but that too is outside 

 the limits of an ordinary hack to covert from the 

 centres to which I have limited myself, and there- 



