‘Seldom have I ridden so hard’
catherine.austen@futurenet.com
Blue Ridge Hunt, Farnley Farm, Virginia, USA
IF you ask the younger generation of Irish huntsmen whom they most try to emulate, the name Graham Buston will come up again and again. A brisk, plainspoken Limerick man, Graham grew up a stone’s throw from the kennels of the county pack, and learnt his trade whipping-in to the great Dick Chapman.
Having hunted the Waterford and the County Limerick with great success, he was already a household name in Ireland when he made the move to the United States nine years ago, first to the Bear Creek in Georgia, and then to the magnificent Blue Ridge country in 2014.
The Blue Ridge hunt a wide-open, galloping country in the valley of the Shenandoah River. The sixth Lord Fairfax, who owned vast tracts of land in Northern Virginia, introduced the first organised foxhunting to what would become the United States when he imported English hounds to
