Explore Britain Today, 46 Upperkirkgate, Dyce (2026)

24/09/2026

Bunbury, Cheshire. Christmas Eve. The Cheshire Hunt's annual meet — now a scent and drag hunt, no fox, no quarry — assembles in winter sunshine on a green village field. A huntsman in scarlet rides a dark bay horse decorated with a gold tinsel wreath around its neck and a green tinsel bow on its tail. The hounds move around them in the low December light, coats gleaming, completely unaware that they are wearing Christmas. In the background, a second rider in scarlet on a bay. The field is empty and bright and cold and entirely peaceful.

This is Christmas Eve in an English village. This is what it has looked like for two hundred years.

The Bunbury Christmas Eve meet is one of those fixtures in the English hunting calendar that exists not for the sport but for the continuity — the annual proof that the village is still here, the hunt is still here, the horses still come out on the morning before Christmas and the people still come to watch them.

Bunbury is a village in mid-Cheshire with a church that has stood since the 14th century. The same church whose bells rang on Christmas Eve when this meet was first established. The same bells that are ringing tonight.

The tinsel on the horse is not ironic. It is not a modern addition to soften the image of hunting for a camera. It has been there, in some form, for as long as anyone in the village can remember. A horse decorated for Christmas morning. The same instinct that put holly on a door and candles in a window — the human need to mark the day with something extra, something bright, something that says: today is different from other days.

The horse does not know it is Christmas Eve. It knows the field. It knows the hounds. It knows the man on its back.

The tinsel catches the winter sun and throws small lights across the grass.

That is enough.

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24/09/2026

Thornbury, Gloucestershire. Boxing Day 2011. The Berkeley Hunt moves through the town high street — a young huntsman in a coat the colour of mustard and old gold rides a dun horse through crowds pressing both pavements, hounds running loose around the horse's hooves. Behind him, a yellow banner: Berkeley Hunt. Above The Swan pub, Christmas tinsel. Traffic cones holding the crowd back. A child in a red coat watching from a first-floor window. The whole scene is ordinary English Boxing Day — except for the coat.

That yellow coat stops everyone who knows what they are looking at.

The Berkeley Hunt is the only hunt in England that wears yellow. Not gold. Not buff. Yellow — the specific bright chrome yellow of the Berkeley family livery, unchanged since the 18th century, worn by every Huntsman and Whipper-In of the Berkeley Hunt for over two hundred and fifty years.

The Berkeley family has hunted the Vale of Berkeley in Gloucestershire since the 1500s. Their castle — Berkeley Castle, where Edward II was murdered in 1327 — still stands seven miles from this high street. The family has held this land, and hunted this land, for longer than most English institutions have existed.

The yellow coat was not chosen for visibility, though it provides that. It was chosen as identity — a declaration that this hunt, on this ground, belongs to this family and no other. In a world where every other hunt in England eventually adopted the same scarlet, the Berkeley kept their yellow the way a very old family keeps an eccentricity: not as a quirk, but as a statement of lineage so long it doesn't need to justify itself.

The hounds in this photograph are pale lemon and white — the Berkeley hounds, bred specifically for their country, their colour as distinctive as the coat above them.

Seven hundred years of one family's relationship with one piece of English ground, walking through a Boxing Day crowd between traffic cones and Christmas tinsel.

The Swan pub has no idea what is passing beneath it.

This secret revealed ......👉 https://smpl.is/adieh

24/09/2026

Dean Row, near Wilmslow, Cheshire. The Cheshire Drag and Bloodhounds ride out through a muddy gateway — a rider in blue raises his cap to the crowd pressing both sides of the fence, hounds streaming through the gap around his horse's hooves. But look at the hounds themselves. They are not the neat tricolour English Foxhound of the great Midland packs. They are bigger. Heavier. Some are almost entirely white. Some have the loose skin and pendulous ears of something ancient and entirely different.

These are Bloodhounds. And they have been tracking humans since before England had a monarchy.

The Bloodhound is the oldest scent hound in recorded history. Its lineage traces to the monastery of Saint-Hubert in the Ardennes — the same saint whose feast day closes the European hunting season — where Belgian monks bred them from the 7th century onward specifically for their tracking ability. The breed was so prized that it was called the Chien de Saint-Hubert, and medieval kings received them as diplomatic gifts.

The Bloodhound's nose contains approximately 300 million scent receptors. A human nose contains around 5 million. A Bloodhound can follow a scent trail that is four days old across ground that has been rained on, walked over, and driven across since the trail was laid. Its evidence is admissible in American courts. It is the only animal in the world whose testimony has legal standing.

The Cheshire Drag and Bloodhounds runs what is called a Clean Boot hunt — the hounds follow the scent of a human runner, not an artificial chemical trail and not a fox. A person goes out on foot before dawn, runs a course across the countryside, and the hounds are cast on their line hours later.

They are hunting a person.

The person is always somewhere warm by the time the hounds arrive.

The practice is medieval. The monks of Saint-Hubert used the same method to train their hounds in the 8th century. The man raising his cap to the Cheshire crowd this morning is continuing an unbroken tradition of human beings running away from Bloodhounds that predates the Norman Conquest by four hundred years.

This secret revealed ......👉 https://smpl.is/adieh

23/09/2026

Dyrehaven, Copenhagen, Denmark. A public park on the edge of the Danish capital — beech forest in late autumn bronze, a thousand spectators pressing the ropes, phones raised. Five riders in scarlet coats take a brush fence simultaneously, horses airborne over a barrier of stacked pine branches and birch poles. Fence number 19. A competition, not a hunt. But the coats are the same. The horses are the same. The jump is the same.

Denmark has been running this for over three hundred years.

The Hubertus Hunt — Hubertusjagten in Danish — takes place every November in Dyrehaven, the ancient royal deer park north of Copenhagen. It is one of the largest and most attended equestrian events in Scandinavia, drawing thousands of spectators to watch riders in traditional hunting dress jump a cross-country course through the forest.

Dyrehaven itself was established as a royal hunting ground in 1669 by King Frederick III. The deer still live there. The beech trees that surround this jump were saplings when the park was enclosed. Some of them were already old when the first Hubertus Hunt was run across this ground.

Saint Hubert is the patron saint of hunters across Catholic and Protestant Europe — a 7th century Belgian bishop whose conversion legend involves a stag with a crucifix between its antlers appearing to him during a hunt on Good Friday. His feast day, 3rd November, became the traditional day for closing ceremonies across European hunting culture. The Hubertusjagten is his day, taken seriously by a country that stopped actively hunting foxes generations ago but never stopped dressing for it.

England exported a uniform. Europe kept it and built its own traditions inside it.

The rider clearing fence 19 in this photograph is Danish. She is riding a Danish horse. She is jumping in a Danish royal park before a Danish crowd on a Danish saint's day.

She is wearing an English coat.

Some things travel so completely they become native.

This secret revealed ......👉 https://smpl.is/adieh

23/09/2026

Blackmill, near Bridgend, South Wales. Boxing Day. The Llangeinor Hunt crosses a hillside above the Ogmore Valley — frost still in the bracken, patches of snow on the path, the hill falling away sharply to the left. Six riders pick their way along a narrow sheep track, horses stepping carefully on the cold ground. Below and behind them: the valley opens into a patchwork of green fields, stone walls, and the white houses of Blackmill clustered around its church. A Welsh village at the bottom of a Welsh hill, exactly where it has been since the Normans built the first stone houses here in the 12th century.

No scarlet coats. No top hats. No ceremony.

This is Welsh hill hunting. And it operates on entirely different terms.

The Llangeinor Hunt takes its name from the village of Llangeinor, high in the hills above Bridgend. Its country is the upland common land and rough grazing of the South Wales valleys — ground that no Leicestershire horse and no Leicestershire method could follow. The hills are steep, the going is unpredictable, the weather comes in from the Bristol Channel with no warning and no mercy.

Hunting in this country has never been about the formal field of fifty subscribers following a Huntsman in scarlet across manicured parkland. It is five or six people who know this hill — who have ridden it since childhood, who know which slopes hold their footing in frost and which become treacherous, who know the farm names and the farmer names going back three generations.

The woman in the centre of the frame is not following a route she was given. She knows this hill. She has always known this hill.

The village at the bottom has watched people ride across this hillside on Boxing Day for longer than anyone can remember. The church in the valley was recording baptisms before the English language existed in its modern form.

The frost does not care about any of this. It comes every winter. The riders come every Boxing Day.

Both things continue.

This secret revealed ......👉 https://smpl.is/adieh

23/09/2026

Meonstoke, Hampshire. Boxing Day. The Hursley Hambledon Hunt moves through the village street in winter sunshine — two huntsmen in scarlet lead the column past The Bucks Head pub, crowds pressed three deep on both pavements, phones raised, a dachshund straining at a lead in the foreground. Behind the scarlet coats, a rider in a Christmas wreath. Behind that, the column stretching back up the hill past Georgian brick houses into the cold blue morning. The huntsman at the front is not performing. He is simply going where he goes every Boxing Day.

This photograph was taken while the Labour government was actively debating a bill to ban trail hunting in England.

Look at the crowd.

Not a protest sign. Not a counter-demonstration. Not a single person in this frame who looks like they came to make a point about anything. They came because the hunt comes through Meonstoke on Boxing Day and they wanted to see it. Some of them brought their children. One person brought a dachshund. The woman in the yellow hat is smiling at something one of the riders just said.

This is what a community that does not feel like a controversy looks like from the inside.

The Hursley Hambledon Hunt takes its name from two ancient Hampshire villages — Hursley, which contains the grave of John Keble, one of the founders of the Oxford Movement, and Hambledon, which contains the ground where the rules of cricket were first codified in the 1760s. This is a corner of England so deep in its own history that the arguments happening in Westminster feel, on a Boxing Day morning in winter sunshine, like weather from somewhere else.

The hunt has ridden through this village for generations. The pub has been here longer. The crowd has always come.

Parliament has tried to end this twice. Both times, the village kept coming out on Boxing Day to watch.

The dachshund has never cared about any of it.

This secret revealed ......👉 https://smpl.is/adieh

22/09/2026

Runnymeade Farm, Chester County, Pennsylvania. Four riders at full gallop along the edge of a harvested cornfield — dried stalks gold and amber behind them, the tree line beyond exploding in every colour fall can make: scarlet, orange, yellow, the deep burgundy of a dying oak. Four bay and chestnut horses in absolute synchrony, all four inside legs lifted at the same moment, manes streaming, riders forward and still in the saddle with the particular quality of stillness that only comes at speed when horse and rider have stopped thinking separately.

England does not have this colour.

This is the detail that most people who associate fox hunting with England have never considered. The English hunting season runs from October through March — the landscape is green and grey and brown, beautiful in its own stripped way, but monochrome in its palette. The colours of English hunting are the colours of winter: mud, frost, pale sky, bare hedgerow.

American fox hunting runs its best days in October and November — and in the eastern states, those months produce a colour display that has no equivalent anywhere in the British Isles. The American fall comes from tree species that Europe does not have in the same abundance: sugar maple, red oak, sweetgum, sassafras. The colours are not just different in degree from the English autumn. They are different in kind.

When English settlers brought the hunt to Pennsylvania in the 1600s, they brought it to a landscape that did things their landscape had never done. They kept the ritual. They kept the coats. They kept the horn calls and the hound names and the social structure of the field.

But they ran it through a forest that turned red every October like nothing they had ever seen at home.

The four riders in this photograph are galloping through something their ancestors could never have imagined when they first packed their hounds onto ships in Bristol harbour three hundred and fifty years ago.

Some traditions improve with the journey.

This secret revealed ......👉 https://smpl.is/adieh

22/09/2026

Runnymeade Farm, Chester County, Pennsylvania. A field of twenty-five riders emerges from dense autumn fog — the mist so thick that the back of the field has already disappeared into it, absorbed completely, as if the fog is generating riders rather than swallowing them. Two scarlet coats burn at the centre of the frame. Black coats on every side. One woman in a bowler hat. One child, maybe twelve, keeping pace on a dark horse at the left edge. The grass beneath them is the colour of old rust. The sky above is the colour of nothing.

This photograph has no horizon. That is not an accident of weather.

Chester County, Pennsylvania sits on some of the most contested ground in American history. This exact landscape — rolling farmland, woodland edges, red-clay soil — was the terrain of the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777, the largest single-day engagement of the American Revolutionary War. Twenty-six thousand men fought across these fields and woodlines for eleven hours. Washington's army lost. The British advance on Philadelphia could not be stopped.

The farm at Brandywine Creek, a few miles from where these riders are now, still stands. The fieldstone walls the British infantry sheltered behind are still in the ground beneath the grass.

The Cheshire Foxhounds have hunted this country since 1912. They ride over Brandywine ground every season without ceremony, without acknowledgement, without stopping.

The fog this morning is not unusual for Chester County in autumn. It comes in off the Brandywine valley before dawn and sits until midmorning, turning every field into this — a closed white world where the only thing visible is what is immediately in front of you.

In 1777, soldiers moved through this same fog toward each other without knowing how close they were.

This morning, twenty-five riders are moving through it toward open country, and nobody is afraid.

The fog doesn't know the difference.

This secret revealed ......👉 https://smpl.is/adieh

19/09/2026

Near Worcester Lodge, Gloucestershire. The Duke of Beaufort's Hunt moves out along a Cotswold lane between green winter fields — Blue and Buff coats at the front, top hats visible throughout the column, the field stretching back so far it disappears into the grey morning mist beyond the farm buildings. On the right: a dry stone wall. Not a fence. Not a hedge. A dry stone wall — every stone placed by hand, without mortar, balanced against its neighbour by weight and friction alone, the way Cotswold farmers have been building them since the Iron Age.

That wall will outlast everyone in this photograph by several centuries.

The dry stone walls of the Cotswolds are one of the most underestimated historical documents in England. Each one is a record — of field boundaries established when strip farming gave way to enclosure, of land ownership disputes settled in the 1600s and 1700s, of the exact moment when a particular farmer decided exactly where his land ended and his neighbour's began.

The walls are also a hunting record. Every gap in a Cotswold wall — and there are thousands of them, each one precisely placed — was put there deliberately, by agreement between the landowner and the hunt, to allow horses to pass through without having to jump. These gaps, called hunting gates or hunt jumps, were negotiated field by field, generation by generation, as part of the relationship between the hunt and the farmers whose land it crossed.

The Beaufort's field moving down this lane has permission to be on every piece of ground it will cross today. That permission was built across two hundred years of mutual obligation — farmers supported by the hunt, hunt supported by farmers, the whole system running on handshakes and memory and the understanding that the wall belongs to the farmer and the gap belongs to everyone.

The telegraph wire above the column is the newest thing in this photograph.

The wall is the oldest.

The riders are somewhere in between — newer than the stones, older than the wire, passing through a landscape that was already ancient when their great-grandparents first rode it.

This secret revealed ......👉 https://smpl.is/adieh

19/09/2026

The Welsh Marches or the Brecon Beacons — a high moorland ridge in winter, heather dark on both sides of a narrow ancient track. Two riders in black coats crest the ridge on horseback, the smaller horse just behind, both riders slightly breathless, both smiling. Behind them: a valley so vast it barely fits in a frame — field systems stretching for miles in every direction, frost still in the hollows, bare trees standing in the pale winter light like stitching on pale cloth, the far hills dissolving into blue-grey haze.

This view has not changed in a thousand years.

The track they just rode up is older than the country it crosses. These high ridge paths — called drovers' roads in Wales and the Marches — were the motorways of medieval Britain. Cattle, sheep, geese, pigs, and their drovers walked them from Wales to the English markets for six hundred years. Herds of a thousand animals at a time moved along these ridges, following the high ground where the going was firm and the direction was clear.

The drovers who walked these paths knew every fold of the land below them. They knew which valley held water in summer and which flooded in winter. They knew where to shelter when the weather came in from the west. They knew the exact moment when the ridge dropped back toward the valley and the market was within reach.

That knowledge — of high ground and distance and the shape of the land beneath your feet — is what these two riders are carrying right now without knowing it.

They rode up the same path the drovers walked. They can see the same valley the drovers watched. The fields below them are the same fields, only the hedges are older now, grown thicker across six more centuries of winter.

Two people on horses, smiling at the top of a ridge.

Behind them: the whole of Britain's past, laid out in frost.

This secret revealed ......👉 https://smpl.is/adieh

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