Author/historian Ron Black, a fourth-generation foot hunter who strove to preserve the foxhunting history of his beloved Cumbria.I never met Ron Black in person, but I knew him so well. We’d been carrying on an email friendship for years. Ron died of cancer on September 5, 2017.
Over the years our correspondence covered all sorts of subjects—foxhunting, politics, world affairs. (He was for Hillary, all the way.) He scoffed at us mounted foxhunters for our preoccupation with horses and fancy clothing, and he would start most notes with, “How are things in the Colonies?” His sense of history was a huge part of who he was. And it was to preserve the history of foxhunting in his beloved Cumbria, after the despised Hunting Act became law, that possessed him to start a website and begin collecting that history.
That’s how John Harrison became friends with Ron Black. Harrison is currently hunting the Deep Run Hunt (VA) foxhounds, but twenty years ago Harrison was huntsman for one of the storied foot packs in the Lake District, the Ullswater Foxhounds. Ron was writing a book about the Ullswater. It was the hunt of Harrison’s boyhood, and he had returned to England from Toronto and North York (ON) to take up the horn there. It is a hard and dangerous place: climbing borrans (stone piles), crags (cliffs), and crossing the scree beds (fallen stone from the crags). It’s country that would ruin a horse the first time out. Harrison hunted the Ullswater hounds on foot there for eighteen seasons before returning to North America three years ago.
“Ron Black was a name I’d heard forever,” said Harrison, “but never actually met him on a one-to-one basis. When he contacted me regarding his books on the Ullswater Hounds many years ago, I got to know him well during the meetings and phone calls. I found him a fascinating character with the blood of the fells running through him, and found him an educated listener to the answers to his questions pertaining to making and managing a pack of fell hounds. I enjoyed discussing any personal thoughts he had, fired by his hunting days on the fell in the company of seasoned fell hunters, but he was quick to acknowledge that years of following hounds by no means made one an expert!
“Our thirst for knowledge of the science of venery seemed to bond us, and I will never forget the late-night phone conversations when his medication-induced insomnia got the better of him and he would call in the middle of the night to see if I was still up! I always answered or called him back.
“I thank him for his honesty and friendship, but mainly for his highly insightful and probing books on hunting in the fells and surrounding areas which stirred a million memories around the globe and thrust it into the face of political correctness whether they liked it or not. He didn’t give a toss what anyone thought about his books. It was his dream to put his thoughts on paper and if it was welcomed, all the better.”
Ron wrote more than a dozen books—histories of the Lakeland hunts, odes to revered huntsmen of the past, the expulsion of residents from a Lakeland village now submerged under a man-made lake, Cumbrian foxhunting songs, collections of ancient foxhunting reports, and Ron’s own foxhunting memories.
“I began following hounds at the age of five, mostly on my father’s shoulders—little legs and the fells not going together!” Ron Black wrote. “I am a native Lakelander, with roots going back to 1700, the fourth generation to follow hounds, with ancestors who stood on the cold tops at dawn, moved the heavy Lakeland stone to free trapped terriers, and also carried the horn on occasions. Hunting will not come back in the foreseeable future, perhaps not at all, but for three hundred years hunting and the church were the central thread to many communities.”
Sheep farming was the area’s industry. And hunting the foxes that preyed on the sheep was its natural extension. Fearful that, in the fullness of time, all memories of his ancient Lakeland culture would be lost forever, Ron began compiling material on his website. He wrote, “It is not my intention for it to be glorified or used as propaganda for or against hunting, but simply to record associations with a sport traditional to Lakeland for over three hundred years.”
Ron sent me what he knew was his last foxhunting story, “Going Home,” which we published last April. For links to other of Ron’s stories published in Foxhunting Life, type his name into the “Search” box, top of left-hand column.
In the next issue, we’ll republish one of my favorite stories by Ron that provides one answer to the question: What is dog to man?
Posted September 9, 2017