• The hunt is based in the purpose-built Quorn Hunt Kennels at Kirby Bellars. It was formed in 1698.

• It meets Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays in the season.

• Its kennels house 130 hounds and employs seven full-time workers.

• The Quorn has around 400 subscribers who ride with the hunt.

• The Quorn Supporters Club has more than 1,000 members.

• It is regularly referred to in the press as Prince Charles’ favourite hunt.

For all Melton Mowbray’s fame for making pork pies and Stilton cheese, there was one thing which really put the quiet market town on the map – hunting.

Like it or not, nothing else has had such a singular impact on Melton Mowbray as the huntsmen and their supporters.

Our first associations with the sport started in the 1700s and soon it became as fashionable to rent a house in Melton as it did

to be seen at a society ball in London.

The town was reputedly “discovered” by colliery owner W.H. Lambton who was looking for somewhere quieter than the usual but raucous Quorndon Hall, Earl Shilton, to stay for the hunting season. He rented a house in Sherrard Street and others quickly followed suit, helping to build Melton into the town it is today.

A reporter for The Daily News wrote in October 1872: “But

for its being the rendezvous for so large and hard riding a set of hunting men, Melton would probably have remained in the peaceful obscurity which surrounds the names of so many small country towns.

“It has not ever done anything else to attract celebrity, unless it be to make some especially succulent pork pies and it might be fairly argued that even this trade is in great measure provoked by the presence in its midst of hunting men.”