CastleMouse
Well-Known Member
But not for some people... Ali was quite jumpy when we were standing around and about to head off, but once we set off down the road he had calmed down slightly, and I managed to give my cap to our hunt sec. without killing him! We started off in a stubble field, and we were standing around for about 10 minutes, and Ali decided to have one of his rearing fits...
He managed to settle down a bit when we set off for a good gallop across the field, and then we were greeted with a dirty drain heading into forestry at the corner of the field... I was the third person after our fieldmaster to go over it, and Ali obviously had to jump very big over it and I nearly got mangled (?) between two trees, but fortunately I stayed on
We did a few smaller drains before arriving to a horrible boggy pit of water... I remembered it from last year, about 85% of the field fell off in it (including our two joint masters and two of the whipper-ins) and had to drag their horses out... I just about managed to stay on Castle when I went through it... Noel Mullins was out with us that day and he took a great sequence of photos of one of the guys who hunts with us going through it, which was printed in the Irish Field the following week. Firstly our field master went through it and came off, and then horse in front of me (who was the third horse to go through) got stuck in it, so 4 people attempted to get the horse out but they had to call in a tractor to get him out as he was so winded
So everyone had to take a huge detour around the forestry back onto the road where our field master was waiting for us with someone else. We then jumped a few hunt palins (Ali flew over them without a bother) and a some more small drains. We then arrived to another dirty boggy drain, and our whipper-in's horse was stuck in it and they had to get a tractor to pull him out, so the whole field had to do another detour over a rather large drain which was extremely narrow and had a tree on either side... I managed to hit my knee quite hard off the tree at the edge of the drain, I'll certainly have a nice bruise there tomorrow... Then we had to go over a 6 bar gate which was slightly tilted... Ali was grand over it, and then whilst I'm galloping off in front with the field master I heard someone shouting loose pony... A boy's pony had jumped a wire fence to the left of the gate and had taken the whole fence down. Fortunately the boy was OK, although he was obviously shocked and a bit battered and bruised. We then jumped a few more hunt palins and we finished up at about 4. It was a decent enough day... A fair amount of jumping and I managed to stay on even though I had a few hairy moments! Ali is still having his rearing fits when we're about to jump something, but fortunately they didn't last long today as I was in front with our field master all day so didn't have to wait around for lots of people to jump before me.
You can't tell from that photo, but the hair is beginning to grow over Ali's wire cut he obtained a few weeks ago. It looks quite dirty as I applied Cornucrescine on the area last night and it's a pain in the a*se to get out of Ali's coat!
You can't tell from that photo, but the hair is beginning to grow over Ali's wire cut he obtained a few weeks ago. It looks quite dirty as I applied Cornucrescine on the area last night and it's a pain in the a*se to get out of Ali's coat!
