The Belvoir hunt were dashing across the Leicestershire countryside one morning when they ran into a group of protesters, who were astonished to discover that one of the faces peering down from beneath a riding hat was black.

“What are you doing with these people?” asked a protester in dismay and confusion.

“I’m enjoying a good day’s hunting, old boy,” came the reply.

“Two hundred years ago these people would have been hunting your ancestors,” the protester countered bitterly.

“Oh, 200 years ago my ancestors would probably have eaten you,” retorted the rider before trotting off on his horse.

The hunter was Derek Laud, who is now best known as a former contestant on Big Brother but who has also served as the first black master of the New Forest hounds.

Although born in south London, he visited the countryside as a child with his parents. He learnt to ride, he took an interest in wild flowers and learnt their Latin names, and he now has a house in Hampshire.

Yet that hunt protester was on to something. It is indeed rare in the countryside to see a face that is not pasty white. Why do black and Asian people seem so indifferent to the green and pleasant bits of their country?

Two years ago the Commission for Racial Equality thought that it might have the answer. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the CRE, said that the countryside was guilty of “passive apartheid”. The truth was, he suggested, that blacks and other ethnic minorities simply did not feel welcome.

Only 1% of country folk are non-white, compared with a nationwide figure of 8%. Hunting, shooting and fishing are a mystery to them and they seem to have absolutely no interest in village fetes and welly throwing contests.

“This is not something that has happened by anybody’s will,” said Phillips at the time. “There is no law and I doubt that anybody in the countryside wants to keep people out, but I think what we are seeing is a gradual drift towards a difficult situation in which people from ethnic minorities feel uncomfortable.”

It was to tackle this gradual drift that a Devon farmer last year launched the Black Farmer Rural Scholarship. Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, 47, was born in Jamaica and came to Britain as a child. Working on his father’s allotment in Birmingham, he dreamt one day of being a farmer.

Now he owns 30 acres on the Devon-Cornwall border, bought with the proceeds of his marketing company, and is enjoying country life so much that he wants to give young black people a chance to work in the rural economy.