By Derek Fanning
A Fascinating Book About A Famous Hunting Hound Breed
L
ife is not always fair and some books which should be classics have never seen the light of day. This was the case for a book about the Kerry Beagle, which was discovered and published by a Loughrea man a couple of years ago. This Loughrea man was the very fine equestrian writer Noel Mullins, who a few years ago was browsing through the library of one of his literary heroes when he came across a valuable manuscript which had never been published. The “library, literary hero and valuable manuscript” were all connected to one man, Stanislaus Lynch. Some would say that Lynch was the finest equestrian and hunting writer which Ireland produced. I have read a lot of hunting literature and I would definitely put him up there. The unpublished manuscript was called “In Search of the Kerry Beagle” and, as Noel perused it in the library in Cavan, he realised he had stumbled across a lost treasure, which bore all the hallmarks of Lynch's best work. With the permission of Stanislaus' wife, Margaret, Noel edited the book and published it in 2017. The book has
been well received but it still hasn't been given the amount of praise which I feel it deserves. Noel passed on the book to me a few months ago, because he knew of my admiration for Lynch, and I read it in a few sittings. I was very happy to see it was equal to the standard of Lynch's other works and, on each successive reading session, I dived gratefully back into the charming, exciting and fascinating world that he conjured, the very different universe of Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. My hope in writing this article is that it will win more readers for this book, a destiny that it fully deserves. There are many enjoyable things in Lynch's text; one of them is the theorising about the provenance of the Kerry Beagle, the other is the fantastic descriptions of the many larger than life people that he met on his hunting forays (including a lot of fabulous passages set in Kerry). I will look firstly at the provenance of the Kerry Beagle. This is a complex subject but I will give the bones of it. There is an aura of mystery around the Kerry Beagle. It's one of the nine native breeds of Irish dogs / hounds, the others
In Search of the Kerry Beagle.
being the Irish Wolfhound, Irish Terrier, Glen of Imaal Terrier, Kerry Blue, Red Setter, White Setter, Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier, and the Irish Water Spaniel. The word “beagle” is misleading for some. The breed is actually the size of a fox hound. The dog got its name from the French word “Beegueule”, which means “open-mouthed”, which is a description of them when they are hunting on a line. The best known Kerry Beagle pack is the Scarteen Hounds in Limerick (Chris Ryan, Huntsman and Master of the Scarteens, wrote a glowing foreword for Noel's edition of Lynch's book). There are a number of foot packs which hunt with Kerry Beagles, mainly in Cork and Kerry.
The breed origins
Pakie Casey Donie O'Driscoll and James O'Sullivan of the Foilmore Club parading their hounds at the Kerry Beagle Hound Show. (photo Noel Mullins) 50
Winter 2020 Irish Country Sports and Country Life
We don't know the exact origin of the breed, and there are many theories. One theory says the breed arrived in Ireland as surviving dogs from the wreckage of the Spanish Armada along the west coast in 1588. Another theory, and a stronger one, is they came from a Welsh monastery; and the Welsh monks, apparently, got them from a monastery in France.
