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The Ennerdale
HuntEnnerdale
never had a mounted “county” pack in the shire style. The hunt of the valley is a Lakeland
fell
pack: men and
women on foot, light-built hounds, and a country of crag, scree, and sheepwalk. The organised pack that
still bears the valley’s name is the Eskdale
& Ennerdale Foxhounds. Older
than that name are the farm hounds of Ennerdale and Kinniside, kept to protect flocks rather than to
stage a social meet.
Fell
hunting, not LeicestershireIn the Lake
District the ground forbids the horse. Six historic foot packs divided the high country: Blencathra,
Coniston, Eskdale & Ennerdale, Lunesdale, Melbreak, and Ullswater (later joined in the Central
Committee of Fell Packs by North Lonsdale). They were formed, in the usual telling, to keep foxes off the
lambing hoggs. Hounds are smaller and more agile than the midland foxhound, with the “hare feet” and long
nails that grip wet rock. A day can run twenty or forty miles. Foxes go to borrans—the stone
heaps and clefts of the fell—and terriers follow them in. That is the pattern Ennerdale has known for two
centuries.
The
Forestry Commission’s own history of Ennerdale Forest, written up to financial year 1951, recorded the
fact without naming the pack: the area was “hunted by one of the well known packs of Lake District fox
hounds.” Sporting rights, the same pages said, were “retained by the owner,” and “it is thought that the
Lord of the Manor may claim the rights.” The Commission was describing land use, not granting a
franchise; but it placed hunting firmly in the valley’s working
landscape.
Before
there was a packLong before
a subscription list, shepherds in Ennerdale and Kinniside kept a few hounds at the farms. They ran loose
and assembled at a halloo when a fox was seen among the lambs or geese. That trencher-fed habit is
documented with unusual vividness in 1810, the summer of the so-called Wild Dog of
Ennerdale—a tawny,
powerful animal that killed sheep across Kinniside and the vale. Local hounds were thrown at it and
failed; a subscribed pack of stronger dogs was then collected; two hundred men drew the fells from Hope
Head toward Wasdale. One chase passed Ennerdale church during Sunday service, and much of the male
congregation followed the cry. The episode is folklore now, but it shows what already existed: valley
hounds, common knowledge of the ground, and hunting as flock protection.
1857: Tommy
Dobson and the named packThe pack
that still carries both dales was put on a standing footing by Tommy
Dobson of Eskdale. He is
recorded as founder and Master from 1857 until
1910, a tenure
of fifty-three years. After his death the mastership passed to Will (Bill)
Porter, already
huntsman, who held the country into the mid-twentieth century. Later still Edmund
Porterhunted the
Eskdale & Ennerdale for some forty years, one of the long-service fell huntsmen whose names stand
with Joe Bowman and Johnny Richardson in Lakeland hunting memory.
Kennels
have been in Eskdale. The hunted country is the wild west: Eskdale, Wasdale, Langdale, and Ennerdale,
with meets reached from Eskdale, Wasdale Head, and the western valleys. It is almost all mountain land.
Neighbouring Melbreakcovers the
country between the Derwent and Ennerdale—Loweswater, Crummock, Buttermere, and the northern gate of the
vale—so the manor has always sat on a boundary between two foot packs rather than inside a single
exclusive hunt. Other packs have crossed into Ennerdale on great runs; the Ullswater hound Cleaver, sent
home from Wasdale with a note in a quill, is the most famous stray.
Country and
characterEnnerdale
is a hard hunting dale. The Liza runs from high among the central fells to the lake at about 360 feet;
the forest boundaries climb above 2,500 feet. Scree, granite and Borrowdale volcanic rock, coastal wind,
and, after 1925, dense conifer blocks all change how a pack can draw. Afforestation removed much of the
old Herdwick ground—the Commission bought 2,717 acres from the Earl of Lonsdale in March 1925 and, with
John Tyson, some 5,547 acres in the valley—but the high unplantable land remained open, and the hunt
continued to use the dale as part of its west-Cumbrian circuit.This was
never a Lowther mounted field. The Earls of Lonsdale owned the manor from the Crown sale of 1822 and sold
surface land to the Forestry Commission a century later. Hunting in the vale belonged to the shepherds
and the fell pack, not to a castle establishment. The Fox and Hounds at Ennerdale Bridge keeps the name
in the village; the old farmhouse at Gillerthwaite became a youth hostel; Black Sail, once a shepherd’s
bothy, stands at the head of the dale. The hunt’s geography is the same spine of lake, river, and high
ground that the manor maps.
Songs and
memoryFell packs
keep their history in song as much as in minute books. There is an Eskdale and
Ennerdale Hunt Song,
attributed to Dr W. S. Eaton of Ennerdale, and pieces such as The
Ennerdale Hunt(1917) and
verses on Tommy Dobson. They name the rocks, the dawn start, and the successive masters. That oral record
is part of why the pack is remembered as a west-Lakeland institution rather than a visitor’s
sport.
After
2004The
Hunting Act
2004made it an
offence in England and Wales to hunt a wild mammal with dogs. The fell packs did not dissolve. They now
describe their days as trail hunting or hound exercise: a laid scent, not a live fox, is the lawful
claim. The law is contested on the ground; police and protest groups have both been active on Cumbrian
fells in recent seasons. A history page should state both facts: the old purpose was fox control on sheep
ground; the present legal frame is the 2004 Act.
For
Ennerdale as a liberty and manor, the hunt is evidence of use, not of a separate royal franchise created
in 1822. The Commission in 1951 thought sporting rights might still sit with “the owner” or the Lord of
the Manor, and it recorded that game stock had been scarce for years. That is as far as that file goes.
The living tradition in the vale is the Eskdale & Ennerdale pack from 1857, with Melbreak on the
northern flank, and behind both of them the older farm hounds of Ennerdale and
Kinniside.In short:
Ennerdale’s hunt is a fell foot pack of the western Lakes. Informal hounds were already on the farms by
1810. The named pack begins with Tommy Dobson in 1857. It hunts
the high ground of Eskdale, Wasdale, and Ennerdale on foot, shares a border with Melbreak, and belongs to
the same working landscape as the Herdwick flock, the 1925 forestry sales, and the unplantable waste at
the head of the dale.
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