How many acres does the typical U.K. hunt use in a day?

[wanabe]

In the U.S., our hunts sometimes never leave one property because of the size of the properties. In the U.K., it's different, isn't it? What is the typical property size and how many do you set hoof on during the course of a day's hunt?

 

[JenHunt]

It depends on the hunt country... where we hunt the lowland is owned by 3 or 4 main land owners and several smaller ones. the moor tops are owned by the same 3 or 4 land owners, managed for sporting rights by keepers and tenanted and farmed by lots of farmers. It's complicated because you have to keep all of them on side, and if one is upset you can't cross the land.

We probably cross 8-10 of the tenanted patches a day, but that might be 4 keepers and 1 land owner!

 

[wanabe]

How many acres do these landowners typically have?

 

[humph]

It varies according to where you are in the country. Down near us in the south west (ish) the biggest land owner is about 6,000 acres but the average is about 300 acres. Some land owners will literally own just a couple of pony paddocks. As a result, in any one day's hunting we'll cover up to about 20 farmers/landowners land.

And yet one of our neighbouring hunts covers a lot of land owned by one very large landowner so they could (although in reality probably wouldn't) spend the whole day within one landowners land.

The type of land hugely affects the type of hunting. Because we have many small holders and resulting small enclosures (fields average at about 3 acres) we jump many hedges, many of which are unprepared and with ditches (we call them rhynes - pronounced reens) because we are close to the river severn and very low lying.

Hope that helps. Are you planning on coming over here for some hunting then?

 

[wanabe]

I would certainly like to, but it probably isn't going to happen.

 

[JenHunt]

I guess the big landowners here are probably in the region of 1000acres, but most would be in the region of 2-300 acres. Like someone else said - it really depends where in the country you are.