grand champion

New Market-Middletown Valley huntsman Ally Storer shows Widget before judge Daphne Wood, MFH  / Christine Cancelli photo

New Market-Middletown Valley Widget 2014 was judged Grand Champion of Show at the Bryn Mawr Hound Show held this year at the Radnor Hunt in Malvern, Pennsylvania on May 30, 2015. 

Huntsman Alasdair Storer is banking on the beautiful tri-colored Crossbred foxhound and her sister Welcome to be the foundations of important female bloodlines for this Maryland pack to build upon. As Storer’s father—an experienced breeder of hounds in England—commented, “You couldn’t ask for a better pedigree.”

Starting with Widget and Welcome, Storer plans to breed one to an Elkridge-Harford Crossbred and the other to a Millbrook Penn-Marydel. This, he hopes, will give him two strong lines of disparate gene pools to keep his breeding options open.

Canadian Grand Champion Eglinton and Caledon Noel 2006 / Paul Wilson photoA lovely English bitch—a veteran of five hunting seasons—was judged Grand Champion at the Canadian Foxhound Show at the London Hunt and Country Club on June 11, 2011. To emerge as Best in Show with that accumulated mileage is quite an achievement. There had to be a story here, so I looked up her pedigree.

Eglinton and Caledon Noel 2006 is descended from all modern English on the sire’s side and fell hound bloodlines on the dam’s side. The answer to her achievement was there, but I didn’t put two-and-two together until I talked to huntsman Steve Clifton.