Pursuit! What Can Be Learned From a Manhunt on the Fells?
For over 125 years, an invitation-only multi-day hare-and-hound chase has been hosted in the heart of England’s Lake District. Find out what’s behind this chase…and why it’s one of the most fascinating tests of character ever devised.
Words By Andrew Boyd Hutchinson
Part 1: THE WHERE
“As soon as the day began to break I put on my shoes and climbed a hill — the ruggedest scramble I ever undertook — falling, the whole way, between big blocks of granite, or leaping from one to another. When I got to the top the dawn had come.” - R.L. Stevenson “Kidnapped” (1886)
The event itself is shrouded in mystery: as heavy as the fog whipping by the crest of Great Gable. To fully understand this story one must understand the fells, the Lake District National Park, and a 400 year-old guesthouse in Cumberland called Seatoller.
When Daniel Defoe published A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain in 1724, he wrote that this setting was “The wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England; the west side, which borders on Cumberland, is indeed bounded by a chain of almost impassable mountains which, in the language of the country, are called Fells.” Renowned for its picturesque and jagged landscape and for its wooly weather, the Lake District is not only the wettest part of England (averaging over 80 inches of rainfall a year), it’s the country’s largest national park, which spans 1,000 square miles and includes such landmarks as Scafell Pike (the tallest mountain in England), Windermere (the longest and largest lake), and Wastwater (the deepest lake).
Inspired by the Lake District, romantic poet William Wordsworth published his Guide to the Lakes in 1810, and by 1835 it had reached its fifth edition, which was particularly influential in popularizing the region. Wordsworth’s writings spanned from Ennerdale, the valley with the most westerly lake in the park, to the “Borrowdale Yews,” ancient yew trees “joined in one solemn and capacious grove…intertwisted fibers serpentine up-coiling and inveterately convolved,” an expanse featuring some of the highest and best-known fells in Cumbria: Great Gable, High Stile, Haystacks, and Kirk Fell, with the impressive pinnacle of Pillar Rock as its showpiece.
Sublime on a calm day, the fells transform under harsh weather. Richard Askwith, writer of the seminal work Feet in the Clouds, described his experience there:
“For more hours than I can remember, a storm has been screaming around me…I have been running — or trying to run — in the mountains. Now I am lost, utterly. Every muscle in my body is shaking, both feet are blistered raw, every joint aches, and my last reserves of warmth and strength are gushing away like steam. A cloud of icy fog clings thickly to everything, smothering the afternoon into twilight. Winds whip it, randomly, like a loose sail in a wild sea. Obscure horrors gust through it: hailstones, dark shapes, hints of lightning, great explosions of rain. Yet I cannot actually see more than a few yards around me — except on two brief occasions when the storm rips the curtain apart to reveal ghastly cliffs in all directions. My map and my local knowledge insist that such cliffs cannot possibly be there. The rip closes too quickly for me to make sense of this.”
The region is notable for its gale-force winds, defined by the U.S. National Weather Service as “sustained surface winds between 40 and 55 miles per hour.” Coastal areas in the Lake District experience 20 days of gales annually, while the mountain peaks endure over 100. To run in these conditions seems crazy, and yet hundreds of athletes do, and have over centuries. Askwith writes:
“The fell-runner has to contend with mud, boulders, pebbles, loose scree, wet grass, bog, slabs of greasy rock, bumps, holes, loose tussocks, streams, and more, much of it concealed by heather or bracken (or, in extreme cases, darkness). With every step, your foot lands at a different angle, which is rarely the kind of angle nature intended. Every footfall — if you’re not concentrating on it — can potentially lead to a sprain, fracture, or fall. And even without mishaps, the incessant sliding-about within your shoes will almost certainly lacerate you with blisters.”
Beyond the undulations of the terrain, there’s also the steep grade: Great Gable rises to nearly 3,000 feet; Haystacks to nearly 2,000. Kirk Fell is described as “a truncated cone, steep sided with a wide level top. The flanks above Wasdale are unremittingly steep, 2,000 feet of grass and scree with little to break the monotony.” Askwith shares: “Then, of course, there’s what you find at the top: rocks, grass, the odd sheep; and, most importantly, the weather. Fell runners spend half their time being lashed by the peculiarly icy varieties of wind and rain that blow at the top of mountains, and worse, being engulfed in cloud…they are real and potentially fatal…the risk that the lost, disoriented, hypothermic runner will plunge off an unseen cliff.” For runners, the region’s appeal — like most extreme sports — lies in the brutal and unforgiving challenge of trying.
Within the park, nestled at the east foot of Honister Pass, is a stone guesthouse in close proximity to the hamlets of Stonethwaite and Seathwaite. Seathwaite dates back to at least 1292, deriving its name from Old Norse, meaning “the clearing where sedge grows” (names that include “thwaite” suggest that the earliest Scandinavian settlers found much of the valley thickly wooded). Besides farming the cleared land, mining was also popular. Around 1565, a graphite deposit was discovered, leading to the establishment of the Honister Slate Mine in 1728 — the last working slate mine in England. Nearby Seatoller House, initially built and owned by local farmer John Fisher and his family until 1864, became lodgings for quarry workers under Moses Pepper, the manager of Honister Slate Mine. Eventually, it transformed into a guesthouse to accommodate the growing number of Lake District visitors.
Today, Seatoller House offers various accommodations, including a library, sitting room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, and an award-winning garden. Sepia-toned photographs of men decorate the walls by the wooden staircase, and while the names and dates may not initially stand out, a closer look reveals that each individual was a master of a unique “hunt.” This detail is critical, as the hunt in question is a manhunt, and it’s here that the scent really picks up.
Part 2: THE WHO
“Sometimes we walked, sometimes ran; and as it drew on to morning, walked ever the less and ran the more.” - R.L. Stevenson “Kidnapped” (1886)
During a walking tour of Cornwall in the spring of 1898, two friends from Cambridge University, George Macaulay Trevelyan (Trinity, 1893) and Geoffrey Winthrop Young (Trinity, 1895), were discussing the book “Kidnapped” by Robert Louis Stevenson. Released five years earlier, the narrative followed the journey of David Balfour, a young man who sets out to claim his inheritance after the death of his father. However, he soon finds himself entangled in political intrigue and betrayal. Abducted by his scheming uncle, Balfour faces shipwrecks, hair-raising encounters, and harrowing circumventions in the Scottish Highlands — including a pursuit by the red-coats. Spurred by this fictional story, plans were laid to recruit friends and recreate the adventure at once. Geoffrey Young enlisted his climbing partner Sidney McDougall (King’s, 1895) to help organize, and the Trevelyan Manhunt was born.
The following description, written by Alice Thomson in the Daily Telegraph, picks up the story:
“Somewhere in the North of England there is a hidden valley where once a year a band of men congregate to crawl through peat bogs, throw themselves over cliffs, hurtle down gullies and wade through streams in search of their prey. Some of the men call themselves hounds. They’re a stocky breed who wear breeches, tweed jackets and ties. When they find their quarry, the hares, they attack them with a ferocity echoed in their blood-curdling Tally-Hos. The hares wear red sashes and blow horns. They are possibly the fastest, toughest, leanest, stealthiest, most cunning creatures in Britain. They have the minds of nuclear scientists, the legs of whippets and nerves of titanium. For they know that if they get caught they will be dragged down, rolled in the mud and humiliated. Even if they escape, they will return covered in scratches and bruises, bleeding and weak with hunger.
In the Victorian era, the men kept this barbarous activity secret, worried that it would upset the ladies…The Africans still know how to track on foot, but for the British it has become all but extinct. Three undergraduates at Cambridge worried that the tracker genes would soon be lost. So they decided to set up their own game…They poured over maps until they found the bleakest spot in Britain — 10 miles wide, with scanty cover, freezing lakes and vertiginous cliffs.”
The event was a mountainous modification of “Hunt the Hare,” played in English schools since the 16th century, and of cross-country running, a late-1860s development. Meeting at Seatoller House in June, 1898, sixteen Cambridge undergraduates — with Trevelyan, Young and McDougall among them — spent four days “chasing” across the central fells of the Lake District. Twelve acted as hounds and four as hares. Trevelyan described one near-capture as “The most exciting five minutes I have ever had in my life…” The stage was set for those “tracker genes” to be carried on.
Sidney McDougall, born in January 1876 in Middleton, Lancashire, was a “keen runner,” who entered Manchester University in 1891 before earning a master’s in history at King’s College and becoming a brilliant engineer. An avid outdoorsman, Sidney was a close friend and confidant of Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who memorialized Sidney in his book Mountain Craft, as one of his “gallant comrades in the mountains.”
Geoffrey Young (born in October, 1876) was known as a climber, poet, educator, and outdoor advocate, in addition to being an author of several notable books on mountaineering. Born in Kensington, Young was educated at Marlborough and began rock climbing shortly before his first term at Trinity College, where he studied Classics and twice won the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse.
Incidentally, an encounter with Robert Baden-Powell (a Major-General in the British Army) occurred in 1901 when he visited the Young home and met Geoffrey. It was here that Baden-Powell learned of the manhunt and sought to incorporate it and other “wide games” into the outdoor education made popular in his book Scouting for Boys… the eventual precursor to modern Boy Scouts and the “Outward Bound” movement, activities that are still popular today.
Third founder George Macaulay Trevelyan, born in February 1876, became a renowned historian and academic. He served as a Fellow of Trinity College until 1903, spent over twenty years as an author, and later returned to Cambridge as a history professor — eventually becoming the Master of Trinity from 1940 to 1951. Apart from his professional life, Trevelyan actively contributed to the National Trust, emphasizing the preservation of historic landscapes and houses (playing a significant role in advocating for the creation of the Lake District National Park). The publication History Today mentioned that Trevelyan “Covered miles in his baggy tweed knickerbockers, his grey ribbed woolen stockings and his large serviceable black boots, maintaining an extremely strenuous pace but keeping up at the same time an energetic conversational flow.” Looking “recognizably English wherever he appeared,” Trevelyan was a distinguished member of a group of families that contributed to English literature and scholarship. These connected families formed a unique aristocracy, combining middle-class virtues with substantial contributions to their native country’s cultural and intellectual background.
Trevelyan considered Geoffrey Young his “greatest friend through life,” writing, “Geoffrey Young became the center of a mountaineering group at the College. I was socially on the fringe of it, but I was never a climber. Sometimes they dragged me up places, but left to myself I was only a walker and runner on the hills.” When it came time to take credit for the manhunt that eventually bore his name, Trevelyan said, “Geoffrey and I invented and initiated the game Manhunt in the Lake District, a game which enabled me to exploit my only athletic accomplishment of running and leaping downhill over very broken ground: my ankles are untwistable.”
One of Young’s preoccupations in college was the local and nocturnal sport of “roof climbing” which he wrote about in a humorous college climbing guide called The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity (which he published anonymously). It was in part a parody of early alpine guidebooks, in part a useful reference work for those, like him, who were keen to clamber up Cambridge’s highest spires. Of the endeavor a colleague shared: “The whole point about roof climbing was its quietness and anonymity. And the University authorities would not take strong actions, such as sending you down, if you kept quiet.” Luckily for Young, the college appointed G. M. Trevelyan to head the panel that “intended” to track down the pamphlet’s author.
All three of the manhunt’s founders served in World War I. Trevelyan commanded a British Red Cross ambulance unit on the Italian front; his defective eyesight meant he was unfit for military service. On Christmas Eve, 1915, he bravely cleared out a military hospital that was the target of an Austro-Hungarian fire, and was personally decorated with the Silver Medal of Military Valor. Geoffrey Young was eventually recruited to the ambulance unit alongside Trevelyan. In August 1917, on the Isonzo Front during the fight for Monte San Gabriele, an explosion required Young’s leg to be amputated. After the amputation, Young walked sixteen miles in two days to avoid being captured by the Austrians. He continued alpine climbing for a number of years afterward — using a specially designed artificial leg. Having been a member of the Officer Training Corps, Sidney McDougall was assigned to the Manchester Regiment. He arrived at Gallipoli as part of a draft of replacement troops in July, 1915. Unfortunately, he was reported missing after an attack in August and was later confirmed killed.
The Trevelyan Manhunt continued until the war and after it. In 1908, Geoffrey Young remarked: “The Lake Hunt delightful. More convivial than usual…the 10th anniversary of our old joke! …Good weather and long hunts. George [Trevelyan] hunted me for three hours, and I got away; pleasant not to be too old yet.”
The event thrived largely because it kept itself anonymous. It wasn’t strictly a secret, but the participants formed a close-knit group of family and friends who returned year after year. Trevelyan’s older brother, Charles Philips Trevelyan, was “Master of the Hunt” from 1901 to 1934. His son, also named George, was a Manhunt participant for 42 years between the 1920s and 1960s. He would become “Master” himself after reviving the hunt following the Second World War.
From adolescence the younger George was always a hare, and would find ingenious ways of evading capture, enjoying the chase so much that he would show himself above bracken or from behind rocks to draw the hounds towards him. He was described as, “a brilliant, elusive hare, who took the chase seriously as a matter of life or death and gave all he had to the escape.” According to his godson, Roger Orgill, no one could outrun George. They could trap him by maneuvering him into difficult terrain, but no one ever caught him with superior speed. “His knowledge of the terrain and of the wily ways of hares gave him an unrivaled ability to point hounds in the most likely direction…He set a pattern of defiance on the part of the hares, constantly courting pursuit yet never permitting easy capture.”
The Trevelyan tradition persists, with successive “Masters of the Hunt” carrying the hunt into the present. About 20 families feature prominently in the Hunt’s history, expanding membership only through recommendations from other members — with horns passed down from fathers to sons. Qualifications require members to be sharp enough to spot a broken branch, fast enough to chase for several hours, and hardy enough to keep going with swollen ankles and broken fingers. Participants have a diverse mix of backgrounds, including PhDs, fell-runners, rugby players, MPs, and eccentric aristocrats. Many involved in the Trevelyan Manhunt are Oxbridge-educated. Membership has produced distinguished academics, senior civil servants, and politicians, including a chancellor of the exchequer, a home secretary, two secretaries of state for India, and a governor of Hong Kong. Additionally, there exists a separate Trinity Lake Hunt (started in 1918), an offshoot for members of Trinity College, Cambridge, operating with similar rules at a different time of the year.
As Richard Askwith shared about his experience at the Trevelyan event in 2013: “The youngest hound I spoke to was fourteen. The oldest was sixty-five. In between, there were two or three who could reasonably be described as elite fell-runners; perhaps a dozen who were definitely in their prime; and at least a dozen more (including me) who definitely weren’t. I heard several mutterings to the effect that I’m slower than I used to be or I tend to rely on cunning these days. Six of the thirty-six participants were women. I’m pretty certain that no one felt left out.”
When reporter Alice Thomson initially asked her brothers to join in the hunt in 1998 one remarked: “I’m not sure we allow girls,” while the other added, “I think they stopped them coming after a bit of hanky panky in a shepherd’s hut.” It later came to light that it was one runner’s mother who had been caught kissing her fiance that had caused women to be outlawed for 20 years.
To cement the Manhunt’s legacy, the Trevelyan family, along with many previous guests, formed a private company in 1977 to buy and keep Seatoller House as they knew and loved it.
Part 3: THE WHAT
“Alan had not said a word, and had run and climbed with such a savage, silent frenzy of hurry, that I knew that he was in mortal fear of some miscarriage. Even now we were on the rock he said nothing, nor so much as relaxed the frowning look upon his face; but clapped flat down, and keeping only one eye above the edge of our place of shelter scouted all round the compass. The dawn had come quite clear; we could see the stony sides of the valley, and its bottom, which was bestrewed with rocks, and the river, which went from one side to another, and made white falls; but nowhere the smoke of a house, nor any living creature but some eagles screaming around a cliff.” - R.L. Stevenson “Kidnapped” (1886)
The rules of the Trevelyan Manhunt have barely changed since its inaugural running in 1898. Thirty to forty individuals convene at Seatoller House on Friday night. Dinner is served and members tell stories of chases past and glean through the Hunt Books. A map is agreed upon to restrict the boundaries of the game for the following day (typically a 10-mile square area), and hares are chosen. Alice Thomson wrote, “As I walked into supper on the first evening, the conversation halted…40 men stopped shoveling lasagne into their mouths and swiveled in their chairs. They ranged in age from 16 to 60 — an exceptionally handsome group, tall with taut muscles and no hint of a paunch or flabby thighs. It was like stumbling into a Greek gymnasium.”
At 7:00 AM the next morning, rain or shine, the hares limber up, wearing red sashes to denote their role and carrying a hunting horn. An hour later they depart with an emphatic blast, giving themselves a 30 minute head-start. By 8:30 the hounds scatter in pursuit.
The earliest description of the game had two pairs of hares — dropped off by a neutral umpire at separate locations from each other — try to reconvene before the 20 or so hounds caught sight of their sashes and captured them (one early photograph shows the hares departing from Seatoller House in a car). A single game would last for days and nights continuously with the hares hiding in caves, disused mines and barns between hair-raising chases down rough fell-sides and scrambles up rocky crags. Today, a touch of the hand will suffice for a “kill” (although rougher capture is permitted, depending on the circumstances), and hares and hounds return to Seatoller House for tea and supper by 5:00 PM each day.
One description called it a “masochistic version of hide and seek specially adapted for the Lakeland Fells.” Another described it this way: “It doesn’t sound dangerous, until you think about it…the word mountains, and all that that implies: rocks, gullies, cliffs, scree, mud, heather, bog, bracken, boulders, crevasses, steep slopes, sheer drops, extreme weather and, of course, disorienting cloud…Then think of the intensity of a playground game of tag — the headlong sprints, the desperate lunges, the evasive twists and turns. And then mix the two together.”
The hounds tend to hunt in a loosely cooperative fashion, often in small groups. Each hare acts independently. No one is allowed to stray beyond the agreed-upon boundaries. Any and all cunning is encouraged (and required). One former Hunt Master said, “A good hare is rarely out of sight, yet seldom caught.” The informal rule is that hares are expected to “give good sport,” which means that, rather than simply hiding away beneath a distant boulder, good hares with no one on their scent will draw attention to themselves from time to time until they are chased (they carry hunting horns for this purpose).
The challenge of the game lies in the fact that ten mountainous square miles is an enormous area for a game involving fewer than forty people. The joy is that success depends partly on fitness, partly on fearlessness, partly on guile; but also, largely, on mastery of the landscape. The best hunters — hounds and hares — know the hunt’s terrain intimately, and understand the threats and opportunities offered by each square foot of ground. Once a hare is captured, the chase ends. By convention, dead hares take a breather and then re-enter the game a little later at a moment and place of their own choosing. Tallies are taken at the day’s conclusion to see how many kills were made.
Tony Greenbank shared his experience from the hunt of 2008:
“Up the craggy ground by Sour Milk Gill they clambered…first, the four hares — including a lady hare — in scarlet sashes. Twenty minutes later, the hounds gave chase, locating their quarry by the taunting sounds of the hunting horn each hare is obliged to carry. Once in full cry, and to shouts of Tally-ho! the hounds gave chase over felltops such as Great Gable, Kirk Fell and Haystacks, depending wherever a hare was sighted before vanishing like a mountain wraith. Or water sprite. Blackbeck Tarn on Haystacks is the final abode of a hunting horn lost following an aquatic clash between hound and hare.”
Richard Askwith wrote of his experience in 2013:
“A hare appears on a distant skyline, sounding a horn. You set off in pursuit, but by the time you get there — maybe half an hour later — the hare is, of course, long gone and far, far away. That’s where the subtleties come in. The thoughtful hound — or, better, group of hounds — will think before chasing. What are the hare’s options, leading from that spot? Are there impassable crags to the north of him? A tempting descent to the west? Where might he (or she) hide? Which slope might he have in mind for a speedy getaway? Which direction or directions should we approach from, to cut off his likely route or to shield us from his sight? Which other hounds are near? Is there scope for luring him into a trap?
Then someone spotted a figure running down from the skyline, about a mile away. That hound looks like his blood is up, said the hound nearest me; which sounded ridiculous, except that it was true. If you’ve ever seen an animal or group of animals — canine, feline, vulpine, whatever — closing in on its prey, you would recognise the body language. The hounds around me began to move in a different way: heads forward, bodies coiled and alert, striding purposefully, swiftly, stealthily. I realized that I was doing the same. Then someone said There he is, and our gaze miraculously followed the speaker’s just in time to see a sashed figure, further down the far hillside than his pursuer, scurrying towards the cleft where that slope disappeared behind ours. We spread out and ran, fast and silently, down and across the fell, instinctively following lines that would maximize our chances of cutting off the hare before he rounded the promontory.
I felt a sense of hyper-alertness: that feeling you get in a car crash of everything being in slow motion. But it was not fear that was pumping adrenaline through my veins: it was a kind of bloodlust. I suspect I may even have been sniffing the air, hungry for my prey, seeking information of any kind to maximize the chances of a kill. Then, somehow, the hare vanished. There didn’t seem to be any cover for him to hide in, but there were so many indentations and obstacles in the valley that it was easy for our line of sight to be interrupted. We tried to sweep around carefully, in such a way as to be sure that he was in front of us…Some time later, a horn blew from the fellside we had originally started from and a red-sashed figure was seen jogging smugly up towards the northern skyline, waving his hunting horn and giving occasional provocative toots.”
Alice Thomson also wrote of her experience in 1998:
“At 8:00 AM they blew their horns and were off, while we were still struggling to locate binoculars, shoelaces and grab squashed banana sandwiches. Within seconds I was soaked. We started jogging up the two-mile hill to the head of the valley. Suddenly, a horn blasted to the left, and a hare was framed on the top of the crest, just below the cloud. Several hounds peeled off to give chase. We kept going. We clambered past some old slate quarries and towards an area called Haystacks. For an hour we wound our way around precipitous rock faces, until our group spotted a flash of red a mile away, and started to run across the bogs. The hare sounded his horn and the chase began. I trailed behind, as we scrambled over boulders and slid down waterfalls. Then I spotted our quarry swimming across a lake. He was running straight towards me, I threw myself at him, but he was too fast. Years of training on the rugby pitch helped him to identify me as the weak link. Shattered, I sat on a rock and watched as the others forced him down. Lunch, I thought, but there were three more hares to snare. By the end of the day my knee was screaming, I’d resorted to drinking from puddles, and I was desperate to get out of my soaking trainers. As we returned to mounds of biscuits and fruit cake, and shook hands with our still quivering hares, I was relieved that it was someone else who had been airlifted back with a hamstring problem.”
Minor injuries were not uncommon: Askwith encountered “two sprained ankles (one severe); one knee that had had a giant ice pack applied to it; two bright red shins (on the same person), torn raw by a sprint through a patch of gorse; and at least one blistered foot (whose owner’s shoe had disintegrated in a bog).” Thomson shared that one old hound told her, “Don’t worry, only one person had to be collected by helicopter last time.”
After the chase, the evening is filled with rousing stories and songs. One participant wrote, “Everyone limped down to the village hall for the evening’s sing-song, an almost equally terrifying event with hares and hounds competing for the best verse.” Another said, “I found it was not only required that one chased over the ten square miles of the Borrowdale fells all day, but one had to contribute fully to the evening entertainment of songs and ballads.”
But ultimately, modern-day accounts zero-in on two notable qualities about the event: the first is the intense mountaincraft required by participants in order to make it a sport. The second is the amount of sheer, unadulterated fun. “I was struck by how much better my fellow hounds understood the landscape than I did,” wrote Askwith. “I had thought that I knew these particular mountains well, but it turned out that I knew only the tops and the ridges connecting them. Most of the landscape — the hollows and buttresses, the streamlets flowing into the larger streams, the bubbles, dents and folds in the lower slopes, the patches of valley vegetation — had simply passed me by in a blur over the years…No wonder the hares outwitted me so easily. Yet already I was getting a sense of how addictive this game can be, testing not just athleticism but guile, mountaincraft and spirit.”
Part 4: THE WHEN
“All day it streamed rain; the island ran like a sop, there was no dry spot to be found; and when I lay down that night, between two boulders that made a kind of roof, my feet were in a bog.” - R.L. Stevenson “Kidnapped” (1886)
Whitsun, also known as Whitsunday or Whit Sunday, is the British name for the Christian holy day of Pentecost, occurring on the seventh Sunday after Easter. Until 1971, Whit Monday, the day after Whitsun, was a public holiday in Britain. These days it’s been replaced with a Spring Bank Holiday on the last Monday in May. This is the holiday that participants have traditionally convened at Seatoller House for the Trevelyan Manhunt.
Seatoller House not only possesses a photographic record of past “Masters” but also of the hunt’s handwritten records — lovingly bound in Hunt Books going all the way back to 1898 — which demonstrates that this event has never been a sport for the faint-hearted.
The earliest accounts offer little more than lists of hunters and tallies of catches. As the years go by, however, they become more detailed: “The one that pleased me most,” wrote Askwith, “involved a young hound who leapt down on his quarry from a high crag and broke his ankle. The first thing he said to the hounds at his side (not entirely realistically) was, Whatever you do, don’t tell my dad.” A few descriptions are embellished with diagrams or drawings showing a hare hiding up a tree, for example, or an incident in 1997 when a hare was surprised while hiding on a ledge and leapt “forward and outward” without thinking about where he was, somersaulting over the pursuing hound and landing on his back fifteen feet below (“a dangerous manoeuvre”). In another entry, a decade earlier, a hare gets similarly carried away when pursued up a tree and simply “leaps out, arms spread” and hopes for the best. The fact that both men lived to tell the tale does not negate the folly of such practices.
Occasionally, the thrill of the chase made the game more dangerous. Alice Thomson shared that the sport became so vicious that for a time the hares, then known as “cavalier couriers,” had to double “as security for their own nerves and necks.” She wrote of her experience with the Hunt Books that hounds were described as “grey, unrecognizable figures, with cruel, animal, nightmare faces advancing along by silent leaps.” And that they were involved in “stalking, bravading, cliff-scaling and scientific circumnavigations — resulting in the desperate chase and slaughter of the more injured hare.” The most devious would drop prone on rocks, pretending to be injured so the hare would feel obliged to come to the rescue. But the hares, the “vermin”, could be equally terrifying. There were legends of some hares defending themselves with iron-shod beams. Beyond incidents of hares climbing trees, there were hares that hid in farmyards (with refuges including a waterbutt and a hayloft, where the hare asked the farmer to then remove the ladder until the coast was clear), melting into parties of tourists, burrowing under a boulder beneath the feet of the pursuing hounds, swimming out to the middle of a tarn and, in several cases, escaping so far up or down precarious rock-faces that hostilities had to be temporarily suspended while more pressing questions of survival were addressed.
In his autobiography, William Beveridge talked of his own involvement in the hunt which he described as consisting of “a party of twenty or thirty going to Seatoller, defining on the map a hunting ground, and sending two of the party with red armlets onto the ground immediately after breakfast; the rest, giving the hares half an hour’s start, followed to stalk them and catch them. The hunt gave scope both for craft and for speed; it went on all day…The membership of the hunt included many who were or became later well known in politics, academic life, writing or the professions…I hunted one day — insanely trying to catch George Trevelyan up the steep side of Crinkle Crags.”
When Alice Thomson returned for the centenary edition of the event, old-timers were allowed back, and octogenarians and daughters could compete together. “It was still raining, but the 80 hounds gathered were already sniffing the air,” she wrote.
“Five hares had set off and I wanted to catch one of them…For hours we crawled through the drenched young bracken, looking for tracks, before hearing a bugle and fanning out. The hare was only a foot away from me (he’d mistaken me for a walker). I reached out and he accelerated. We skidded down the hill but he was gaining ground. I was desperate. Then Jethro, the leanest, meanest of the hounds overtook me. Barely out of his teens, he wore a British junior fell-runners T-shirt. He chased the hare for a mile before throwing himself at his red sash and grappling him to the ground. It was his third catch of the day. The sun came out and we ate Marmite sandwiches sitting on parsley fern. One older hound worried that the game was becoming too professional, with computer print-outs of scores. As we headed home for tea, a red sash suddenly shot past, with four hounds following. It was 4:55 PM, only five minutes before the game ended, and the hare was determined to make it home. He came within five yards of safety but the baying hounds were on him. In desperation, he started climbing the nearest tree, with the hounds barking at the base. The master sent them up. My brother finally staggered back at 7:00 PM, having been chased eight miles down to the pub, before wending his way back in the gloom: he was the only hare who had escaped capture.”
A pamphlet produced that year to mark the centennial included quotes from letters sent in by satisfied hunters over the years: “I have rarely found myself subject to such extremes of physical and mental alertness as I experienced on the third day when I found myself being hunted from three directions,” wrote one. Another shared, “As I settled into the seat of the 747 last night, I looked at my fellow passengers around me and a glow of well-being seemed to come over me from nowhere. None of them could ever appreciate the satisfaction of chasing a hare in driving rain from the slopes of one mountain across the top of another, round a third and down the screes.”
Part 5: THE WHY
“With that he began to run forward on his hands and knees with an incredible quickness, as though it were his natural way of going. All the time, too, he kept winding in and out in the lower parts of the moorland where we were the best concealed. Some of these had been burned or at least scathed with fire; and there rose in our faces (which were close to the ground) a blinding, choking dust as fine as smoke. The water was long out; and this posture of running on the hands and knees brings an overmastering weakness and weariness, so that the joints ache and the wrists faint under your weight.” - R.L. Stevenson “Kidnapped” (1886)
The Trevelyan Manhunt is a private affair. There are no applications, no racing bibs, and no qualifying times. Similar to the Barkley Marathons or the Dipsea Trail Race this was a friendly, local challenge that prompted return participation, again and again. Unlike those events, however, the manhunt has remained under the radar. There is a school of thought within the hunt that holds that the sport is “ennobling,” to quote one former Master.
The hunt has endured both World Wars, with entries from the Hunt Books commemorating those who have “died since the last hunt” which illustrate that survivors were determined to squeeze every last drop of joy out of whatever moments remained to them: “They’d been through such horrors in the trenches, they weren’t really afraid of things any more,” said one hound. “Not the way we are.” Embracing a reckless game in the fells with enthusiasm gave participants a weekend relieved of civic responsibilities.
The game was a challenge unto itself, but it also held personal importance. Askwith wrote, “Our day’s hunting lasted eight and a half hours, over nine mountains and five valleys, and I hate to think how many thousands of feet of ascent and descent or miles of running. I failed to make a kill of my own, and have been mulling over the might-have-beens ever since.” To participate as either hunter or hunted prioritized a singular purpose — eat or be eaten— instead of the normal cacophony of the outside world.
Of course, people cannot be made fundamentally better by behaving recklessly in the mountains, no matter how much it’s enjoyed. It’s hard to argue, however, that they are often made worse by their moments of childish fearlessness. It seems unlikely that one would spend three days straining every fiber of body and mind in adventurous pursuits and not return somehow enhanced — if not a better person, then perhaps at least more of a person — more alive and more awake to the world. As Robin Dower, a Trevelyan descendant and former Master from 1987 to 1998, put it: “It is very natural that the spirit should exult, as it meets the timeless challenge to mind and strength that underlies our relationship with the mountains.”
This exultation is the goal. For any running endeavor: from a jog down the block to an Olympic final, the feeling of freedom, of lightness, of controlled exertion is the reward. “Happiness is only real when shared,” wrote one adventurer. So too, have these manhunters found shared happiness with their exultations. May it enlighten us all.
“Never stop at the top, never dally in the valley Oh,
Do not shilly-shally when you hear the shout of Tally-ho.
Up, down, chase around, obey the master’s call.
Till hares are caught, no hunter ought, to take a rest at all.”
For more information about the prompting of this particular story, and for the full and detailed bibliography, please read Behind-The-Scenes, Tribute and Bibliography: The Story of How Seatoller and the Trevelyan Manhunt Came to Fruition.
Additionally, please consider donating via PayPal to help support creative historical investigations such as this one.
Andrew Boyd Hutchinson is an educator, runner, coach, and harrier maven. He is the proud author of The Complete History of Cross-Country Running.
