The Spectator’s Notes | 4 March 2006

Last week our local hunt met at a subscriber’s farm. Because it was a weekday, the mounted field was small — half a dozen or so. As soon as they moved off, they were pursued by 31 masked men, many of them carrying fence posts. When three of the field rode up to them to tell them to leave the private land, some raised the posts above their heads, two-handed, and tried to bring them down with full force on a horse’s face. The rider, a woman aged 60, turned so that she, not her horse, took the force of the blows, and the happy side-effect was that the horse floored one of the gang with both hooves. The main body of the antis then caught up with a 30-year-old farmer’s son on a quad bike. They pulled him off it, smashed it up and attacked him with staves, bricks and concrete blocks, breaking his skull in three places.