Badminton (Glos)

“Home to the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, the Badminton Estate is set within the beautiful South Gloucestershire countryside. The Estate hosts many outdoor events and sporting challenges including the world famous Badminton Horse Trials and can be hired for weddings, corporate activities and filming.” Badminton is a fabulous place, and talking of outdoor events, it even comes with its own hunt. The Duke of Beaufort’s Hunt (aka the Beaufort) is of course based out of Badminton, and hounds have been kenneled there since 1640. The Beaufort was the then-Prince Charles’s and the then-Camilla Parker-Bowles’ ride of choice, and just ten miles from Highgrove where they lived. Ostensibly very proud of the lineage of their foxhounds, the Beaufort were in 2022 the first hunt to be properly exposed for having untrained staff shoot their unwanted hounds. In 2021 two members of the Beaufort Hunt, were charged with illegal hunting (case dropped), and recently the Beaufort has been filmed hunting in the grounds of Highgrove (presumably with the landowners’ permission) and in a separate incident their hounds captured on CCTV ‘marauding’ through a private garden in a local village. The grounds are regularly offered to other packs to hunt on.