FACING the last decade of his first century, Michael McEwan has seen an awful lot of life but freely admits that he owes much of his fun in life to ‘the horse and the hound’.

He had his first day out all the way back in 1936 with the New Forest Foxhounds in Hampshire, England. After school at Wellington, an army career beckoned and so to Sandhurst where he hunted the Sandhurst Beagles. Leave was inevitably spent hunting in Waterford with the late Elsie Morgan and her famous white hounds which gave him a lifelong love of Irish hunting.