The Hampshire Hunt: 1749-2022 by Adrian Dangar
Making a foray into unfamiliar hunt country is always diverting, especially when High Leicestershire is home. What better reason for broadening the horizons than The Field contributor Adrian Dangar’s new history of the Hampshire Hunt. This glossy, comprehensive volume full of diverting anecdotes and thorough research is limited to 500 numbered copies.
Dangar follows the hunt on its near 300-year history, from the reason behind the Prince of Wales’ feathers that grace their hunt buttons to the visit by his namesake 230 years later. Chapters are divided into successive eras, with the names of the mastership and a useful precis of the subjects discussed at the start of each.
From a riot of archive material, minute books and press cuttings, Dangar has marshalled a detailed history written with style. What emerges is a sense of resilience, how the history of a hunt is the history of all foxhunting, the camaraderie of what we do, and how we are all bound together by the music of hounds.
Reviewed by Alexandra Henton
An Unanchored Heart by Rory Knight Bruce
Great swathes are really quite naughty: we have a frank account of sex in a Parisian porn shop as well as details of anger-fuelled shenanigans in rustic Greece.
But it would be priggish to fail to extol the joys of this book, as the reflections of this contributor to The Field are such a rompingly absorbing read, by turns funny, touching, moving and, yes, shocking, in almost equal measure.
Knight Bruce’s memoirs start and finish in Devon, where he moved when his father died and where certain personal ghosts seem to persist. For all his years of studying and campaigning in Edinburgh, and learning and plying his trade in the Fleet Street of old, he has retained his profound love of the countryside. This book is rich in anecdotes from every stage and act, and his bracing honesty ensures there is no pretension or artifice. Knight Bruce has indeed played many parts.
Reviewed by Ettie Neil-Gallacher
My Labrador Doesn’t Always Wear Red Suspenders compiled by Major Tim MacMullen
A compilation of anecdotes from those who have served at the Stanford Training Area in Norfolk. The foreword comes from General The Lord Dannatt, who observes that “soldiers and stories chime together like the proverbial gin and tonic” and what follows amply bears testament to this.
Most of the stories are related to embarrassments, faux pas and inadvertent results out in the field – such as the tale of a salmon that got caught between the legs of a woman on Dartmoor, and a canine Macnab on the River Wissey. And indeed, not only will the contents do one’s spirits good this Christmas, but purchasers can wallow in the warm glow of having actually done some festive good: all proceeds from the sale of the book go to Blind Veterans UK, formerly known as St Dunstan’s, which helps servicemen and women who have had their sight impaired while serving. Anschluss Publishing
Reviewed by Ettie Neil-Gallacher
Wild Light by Angela Harding
Rutland-based printmaker Angela Harding mightn’t be the first artist to be inspired by light; indeed, she points this much out in the opening lines: it “is a common story… much talked about by poets, writers and makers of many mediums, as well as printmakers and painters. There have been times when the search for natural light and a reconnection to landscape has driven whole art movements.” But it would be churlish not to recognise this book, which takes the diurnal and nocturnal light variations as its starting point, for its originality and vivacity.
Harding takes us through her techniques with clarity, and her reflections are pithy. Starting each chapter with a poem to set the tone, and using block printing combined with silkscreen printing, Harding captures myriad country creatures: foxes in Norfolk at dawn, osprey in the morning light over Rutland Water, a plover in the midday summer sun in Suffolk, a hedgehog at dusk on Alderney, a pheasant that “seemed to glow” in the twilight, and the late Queen’s swan at night.
Reviewed by Ettie Neil-Gallacher
