I thought it was time for another thatched animal – I took this photo on a frosty February morning at a house in Arrington where I was working. As you can see it’s a rather handsome fox. Confusingly, the thatch roof is immediately behind the tiled roof. The lady customer ‘rides to hounds’ as they used to say, in other words she enjoys fox hunting, albeit in its new modern form! Hence the fox on her thatched roof. Inside her house she had many other pictures and ornaments of a foxy, hunting theme, highlighting her interest in this country past time.

An internet search tells us that fox hunting is: An activity involving the tracking, chase and, if caught, the killing of a fox, traditionally a red fox, by trained foxhounds or other scent hounds, and a group of unarmed followers led by a “master of foxhounds” (“master of hounds”), who follow the hounds on foot or on horseback.

Fox hunting with hounds, as a formalised activity, originated in England in the sixteenth century, in a form very similar to that practised until February 2005, when a law banning the activity in England and Wales came into force. A ban on hunting in Scotland had been passed in 2002, but it continues to be within the law in Northern Ireland and several other countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Ireland and the United States. In Australia, the term also refers to the hunting of foxes with firearms, similar to deer hunting.