Hare, Hound, Fox and Poacher: Folk Songs of the Chase in Britain and Ireland

British and Irish folk songs spanning four centuries of balladry about hare coursing, fox hunting and poaching — a people's history of the chase, drawn from English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh traditions, with geographic anchors from County Tyrone to Dartmoor, from the Scottish Borders to the Pennine moors above Saddleworth. THE WHITE HARE SONGS The playlist's heart is its cluster of white hare songs. The Creggan White Hare (Daoiri Farrell) sends sportsmen from across County Tyrone after a legendary animal with pedigree greyhounds — only to watch it leap clean over the dogs and vanish, ending with a toast to its freedom. The White Hare of Howden / Oldham variants (The Watersons, Hebble, Anne Dewhurst) trace a single song recorded by Percy Grainger from Joseph Taylor in 1906, sung after coursing meets across Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Brown Hare of Whitebrook, written by Saddleworth's Moorland Poet Ammon Wrigley and kept alive by the Holme Valley Beagles' singing tradition, ends with a huntsman granting permanent protection to a hare he admires — a voluntary amnesty that has always been part of the tradition itself. THE ANIMAL'S VOICE Two songs give first-person voice to the quarry. The Hare's Lament (Ye Vagabonds), from Sam Henry's Ulster collection, has the hare narrate its own death, cursing the hounds Bowman and Ringwood by name. Reynard the Fox (Martin Carthy) lets the fox recount his own killing, his foreleg finally dipped in a bumper and drunk as a toast. Both are ancient and indigenous to the tradition — not modern impositions upon it. THE POACHING SONGS The Lincolnshire Poacher (c.1776) treats poaching as pure defiant joy — it became the regimental march of the 10th Foot and the call sign of a British intelligence numbers station until 2008. Rufford Park Poachers (The Longest Johns) records a real 1851 confrontation at the Earl of Scarborough's Nottinghamshire estate, where poachers declared that game was "set on earth for everyone quite equally to share." Percy Grainger collected the tune in 1908 and later used it in his Lincolnshire Posy. Van Diemen's Land and The Poachers (The Corries) are the transportation ballads — fourteen years in Tasmania for taking a hare. Johnny O'Breadisley (Ewan MacColl) is Child Ballad 114, a medieval Border deer-poacher who kills six royal foresters single-handed. The Gallant Poacher (Martin Carthy), The Sledmere Poachers and Adam the Poacher run the full range from tragedy to comedy. THE HUNTING SONGS John Peel and Horn of the Hunter (Maddy Prior and Tim Hart) celebrate Cumberland fell hunting — farmers and shepherds on foot in plain Skiddaw grey, no broadcloth of scarlet. The Kielder Hunt follows Northumbrian shepherd lads across vast moorland terrain. Dido Bendigo (The Watersons) traces to a broadside of c.1650 describing a hunt led by the Duke of Buckingham, its pleasure lying in the rolling of extravagant hound names. We'll All Go a-Hunting Today and A Fine Hunting Day draw farmer, judge, parson and doctor alike into the field. Three Jolly Huntsmen provides the comic relief. THE PERFORMERS Ewan MacColl, Martin Carthy, The Watersons, Maddy Prior and Tim Hart, The Dubliners, The Corries, Daoiri Farrell, Ye Vagabonds, The Longest Johns — the roster traces the full arc of the British and Irish folk revivals from the 1960s to the present day. Across four centuries and four national traditions, these songs hold one sustained conversation about land, wildness, and the right to pursue a hare across an open field. The poacher and the coursing man, the fell huntsman and the transported convict, Reynard running for his life and the Creggan white hare leaping clean over the dogs — all voices in the same argument, and none of them has yet had the final word.