Given its name, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that the English pointer — that quintessentially British ‘bird dog’ portrayed so often in old sporting paintings in manor houses — is as much a product of UK soil as an oak tree. And it has its roots just as firmly entrenched.
However, while some of its blood might seep, sap-like, from early English hunting dogs, it is very much a product of imported dogs from the Continent and, in particular, Spain.
“English pointers and setters are perhaps more widely appreciated abroad than they are here” Colonel David Hancock, author, writer and dog historian, quotes Gaston Phoebus, the famous Comte de Foix who, at the end of the 14th century, wrote: “And as one talks of a greyhound of Britain, the……
