side saddle
Our First Foxhunt Over the Irish Banks
Here’s a second condensed installment from We Go Foxhunting Abroad: A First Venture with the Irish Banks and English Downs, Charles D. Lanier’s 1924 account of a father-daughter sporting trip to Ireland and England.
We put on our hunting things Saturday morning and climbed into the flivver for our first hunt with the United.
B had taken care to remove from her coat the orange collar of our home hunt colors, and I wore the regulation “visiting” dress of American custom—dark Oxford grey coat, cream colored Bedford cord britches, plain black jack boots and hunting bowler. I have never become an authority on the niceties of hunting etiquette and was simply aware one could not go amiss in these unpretentious togs.
Our flivver soon began to overtake people bound for the meet, gentlemen and ladies jogging along on short-tailed beasts with enormous quarters and hocks, grooms leading horses with their riderless saddles carefully protected by slip covers from the showers, which appear in South Ireland without a moment’s notice or a discernable cloud; showers that pass away, generally, as quickly as they come, with no one paying the slightest attention.
Irish Foxhunter Sets Side Saddle High Jump Records
Susan Oakes establishes new side saddle record for jumping triple bar at six feet, four-and-a-half inches from ground level. / Noel Mullins photo
Susan Oakes—Joint-Master of the Grallagh Harriers and the organizer of last year’s international ladies’ side saddle hunt with the Meath Foxhounds—set two side saddle high jump world records at the Irish National Sports Center on October 24, 2013.
Oakes jumped six feet, eight inches over a puissance wall, breaking her own record of five feet which she established just this summer at the RDS Dublin Horse Show. Then she established a world record of six feet, four-and-a-half inches for jumping a triple bar from ground level.
A world record of six feet, six inches for the triple bar set in Australia in 1915 still stands unbroken, but that record was established by jumping off a ramp. Foxhunting Life reported on Oakes’s attempt to break that record last year and also reported on the international ladies’ side saddle hunt that Oakes organized at the Meath last year. Fifty ladies from nine countries including the U.S. participated in that elegant affair.
Meath Foxhounds Host International Ladies’ Side Saddle Hunt
Side saddle meet organizer Susan Oakes with her stallion, SIEC Atlas, at The Knightsbrook Hotel in Trim before the meet
The Ladies Side Saddle Hunt at Boyerstown, County Meath in Ireland was the brainchild of the Meath Foxhounds Masters and side saddle enthusiast Susan Oakes who is the current British side saddle high jump record holder at five-feet-nine-inches. (At Aintree last year Susan just rolled the top pole in her attempt at the world record of six-feet-six-inches.)
The meet, or was it a Ladies Gathering, was a world record turnout of lady side saddle riders seen in any hunt country. Up to fifty ladies from Ireland, USA, England, Scotland, Wales, France, Italy, Sweden, and Belgium descended on County Meath, and what an impact they made. It was like a scene from the last century when ladies still rode side saddle, with high standards of hunting dress, style, and elegance.
Irish Foxhunter Will Attempt Side Saddle High Jump Record
Susan Oakes and saddle, the provenance of which includes the training of ceremonial horses for Queen Elizabeth IILongtime foxhunter Susan Oakes will attempt to set a new world record for the side saddle high jump at Aintree’s Annual National Show on July 28, 2012. The record of six feet, six inches was set by Mrs. Esther M. Stace at the Royal Sydney Easter Show, Australia, in 1915.
Susan Oakes hails from County Meath, where her parents Clare and Oliver and her sister Elizabeth are all involved in horses. Since childhood she has pony clubbed and hunted with the Meath Foxhounds, Tara Harriers and the Ward Union Staghounds, often riding side saddle. She also campaigns her point-to-point horses Parson’s Pistol and O’Muircheartaigh. She is also a show judge of hunters and side saddle, and an accomplished show rider winning the first ever coloured horse class at the RDS with Cisco Kid, and the coloured cob class with Crowboy JJ.
