All Seeing Me

Oooomph

Spent a very pleasant afternoon photographing the Johnstown Charity Hunt fun run in aid of Lismullen National School.  This is one of the first events of the annual hunt calender with well over 200 horses taking part. It was my first time to photograph such an event and it was certainly a learning curve. Lorraine accompanied me and positioned herself in the best spot of the day in front of one of the early jumps. She was just to my left sitting at the bottom of a hedge looking up as the riders came over the wall. She got a card full of cracking shots but……… unfortunately she manually focussed on the wrong spot and all her images were blurred. What a pity!

Anyway, the people who successfully cleared the wall didn’t really make for great shots. We wanted fallers, and fallers we got! This first chappie came over the wall faster than his horse which wasn’t a great idea.

Woooah

Then behind him came this lassie who cleared the wall but lost her stirrups!

And down she came

Try as she might, she couldn’t hang on…….

Ouch!

Down she came with a thump! In fact, she went back hard and cracked her head with an unmerciful wallop on the ground. Luckily she was well protected with body armour and a helmet, otherwise she would have been seriously hurt.

However, the only things hurt today were egos and pride!

It’s a long time since I went to a hunt meeting and it was an amazing spectacle. The participants ranged in age from 7 to 70 and seemed to come from all walks of life. There were even more followers along the route cheering the riders on. It’s a beautiful sight to see the riders head out across the countryside enjoying their day while raising much needed funds for local causes. Shame on the Green Party and their ilk for trying to stop such country pursuits. They should stick to the little few urban areas they represent and leave the countryside alone.

• October 17th, 2010
• Hunting, Rural Ireland, Sport
• 8 comments
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