I ONCE rode a four-year-old 19 miles to an autumn hunting fixture. He was what Pat O’Brien, then whipper-in to the Tipperary Foxhounds, tactfully referred to as ‘an active young horse’. Pat had ample opportunity to cast his expert eye over him on the previous morning’s hunting, when he twice caught him for me after the gelding had bucked me off. Tacking him up at five in the morning and riding him across half of South Tipperary in the starry pre-dawn was admittedly drastic, but he was nicely settled by the time we found ourselves standing on a hillside in the golden morning light, listening to hounds rattling up and down a furzey valley below.

Autumn hunting is for the education of the young - boisterous newly entered puppies; fidgety, green young horses; keen boys and girls who think nothing of rising before the sun in the hope that they’ll be invited to do a bit of whipping-in. It is an aspect of the hunting year whose charms are lost on many life-long fox hunters, but those charms can be very great indeed.