On The Lincolnshire Wolds.

On The Lincolnshire Wolds.

I started to meet Lord Yarborough’s hounds, from the house of a friend, on a capital Wold pony for cover hack. It used to be said, before non-riding masters of hounds had broadcasted bridle-gates over the Quorn country, that a Leicestershire hack was a pretty good hunter for other counties. We may say the same of a Lincolnshire Wolds pony his master, farming not less than three hundred and more likely fifteen hundred acres, has no time to lose in crawling about on a punchy half-bred cart-horse, like a smock-frocked tenant the farm must be visited before hunting, and the market-towns lie too far off for five miles an hour jog-trot to suit. It is the Wold fashion to ride farming at a pretty good pace, and take the fences in a fly where the gate stands at the wrong corner of the field. Broad strips of turf fringe the road, offering every excuse for a gallop, and our guide continually turned through a gate or over a hurdle, and through half a dozen fields, to save two sides of an angle. These fields contrast strangely with the ancient counties large, and square, and clean, with little ground lost in hedgerows. The great cop banks of Essex, Devon, and Cheshire are almost unknown villages you scarcely see, farmhouses rarely from the roadside, for they mostly stand well back in the midst of their acres. Gradually creeping up the Wold passing through, here vast turnip-fields, fed over by armies of long-woolled Lincoln sheep; there, stubble yielding before from a dozen to a score of pair-horse ploughs, silent witnesses of the scale of Lincolnshire farming at length we see descending and winding along a bridle-road before us, the pied pack and the gleam of the huntsman’s scarlet. Around, from every point of the compass the field come ambling, trotting, cantering, galloping, on hacks, on hunters, through gates or over fences, practising their Yorkshire four-year-olds. There are squires of every degree, Lincolnshire M.P.’s, parsons in black, in number beyond average; tenant-farmers, in quantity and quality such as no other county we have ever seen can boast, velvet-capped and scarlet-coated, many with the Brocklesby hunt button, mounted on first-class hunters, whom it was a pleasure to see them handle; and these were not young bloods, outrunning the constable, astonishing their landlords and alarming their fathers; but amongst the ruck were respectable grandfathers who had begun hunting on ponies when Stubbs was painting great-grandfather Smith, and who had as a matter of course brought up their sons to follow the line in which they had been cheered on by Arthur Young’s Lord Yarborough. There they were, of all ages, from the white-haired veteran who could tell you when every field had been inclosed, to the little petticoated orphan boy on a pony, whose father’s farm had been put in trust for him by the good Earl.