March 7, 2020

Author-editor Steve Price was so smitten with Dickie Power’s Scarteen hunt report in our last issue, that he offers this slice of his own experience at Scarteen. Steve is in the process of writing his equestrian memoir, "The Outside of a Horse," and has allowed us to publish this advanced peek at his work-in-progress in which he recalls a day with the Scarteen while on a 1973 equestrian journalists’ junket to Ireland.

Steve Price (right-center) and Carol Clark (left-center) hunting with the Scarteen in 1973

Carol Clark, then editor of the Practical Horseman, had done her homework. During our Friday-morning drive to the village of Knocklong on the Limerick-Tipperary county line, she told me about our host, Thady Ryan. The Ryans had owned the Scarteen pack, named after their ancestral manor house, since 1798. Thady (né Thaddeus) was the most recent in the chain of Ryan men to serve as Master and huntsman. In addition to breeding, training, and caring for his hounds, and breeding and hunting his horses, Thady was a Dublin Horse show official and chef d'équipe of the Irish Olympic three-day team at the Tokyo and Mexico Olympics.

Huntsman David Masterson with Masters Tom McNamara, Michael Lennon, and Jackie Lee with whipper-in Gabriel Slattery at Shrule Castle directly across from TJ Gibbons Pub. Shrule Castle, a Norman keep, was built by the de Burgh family in 1238. / Noel Mullins photo

The hunting country of the North Galway Foxhounds was originally hunted by the Bermingham & North Galway Foxhounds, founded in 1946 by Sir Dermott and Lady Molly Cusack-Smith. Lady Molly had hunted the Galway Blazers during World War II. When the Bermingham and North Galway was disbanded in 1985, the North Galway Foxhounds was formed.

The meet was at TJ Gibbons Pub in Shrule, County Mayo, which has been in the family since 1925 and is now managed by Ronan Gibbons. The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne as Sean Thornton and Maureen O’Hara as Mary Kate, was filmed in nearby Cong and The Neale.