Trouble keeping the horsefly at bay

HORSES follow me to the gate, bringing hordes of stinging flies with them. If they were my horses, they would either be stabled away from the flies or else wearing one of those anti-fly rugs and face masks that make them look like knights' horses 'in gay caparison'.

Oh please bring us in, they say to me, but I am merely crossing their field on the footpath, and have no control over their care. I once saw a close-up of a horsefly, depicting long sawing mouth-parts, and I can see why horses hate them so. It takes the most toxic fly spray to keep these monsters at bay: mere citronella is like condiment to them.

I go through the gate, leaving my new friends behind with some difficulty, but down the track I can see the approaching Landrover bringing their owner, so they will be more comfortable by and by.

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Hunters have been up for a few weeks now, and completed their walking exercise in most cases. The ground is so hard that, road or bridleway, they can only walk and trot, while heat-baked ruts make the old byways treacherous.

It is hard to believe that in a very few months' time, these same bone-dry ridges and hollows will be back to sucking winter mud, deep holes and long puddles. At least the tracks and headlands should by then be soft enough for fast work from hound and horse alike, and where the stubbles have been left, and bowed their tips to winter rain, we shall be able to skim along in pursuit of good scent, with the ground springing back to our footfall.

But there is time yet to enjoy what is often the best of the summer, as it eases gently into what I hope will be a long rich autumn. Already berries are starting to ripen on the spray, and there is pleasant work to come. We walk on by ragged honey-scented hedgerows promising a harvest of this and that, and then along an avenue of mature limes, that now lead nowhere but once flanked a long curving drive to a house that died in the War.

There are only the remains of the foundations now. I make a sudden detour as I see a large rough-textured pear-shaped structure hanging in one of the lime-trees, taking in all at once the stream of wasps towards and away from it, and the striped-for-danger yellow and black bodies crawling over the sweet stickiness pushed out by the limes.

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Perhaps I will not be picking anything soon from this stretch of hedgerow, and after all, there are plenty of others. Sitting by the entrance of a rabbit-hole among the hawthorn and blackthorn roots is a dapper brown rabbit, washing its whiskers like a cat. Perhaps rabbits are not troubled by wasps. Certainly I have ferreted warrens in summer and found wasps living among the rabbits, which has caused a hasty change of plan on my part, and a "strategic withdrawal to prepared positions" in the best military tradition.

Taking the right fork of the track, through a kissing-gate almost held shut by new bramble growth and then along the lane with the row of farm cottages, I cross the metalled road with the dogs on leads and then am back through another gate into the meadows where they can run freely.

You can see the church from here, and I am nearly at my destination.

In the fields hard by, polo ponies canter with that steady lope that builds up fitness, each rider leading another four, two each side.

Different disciplines, different lives, like the facets of a diamond, sparkle through the countryside and make up its infinite variety.