THE north Cotswolds' Lesley Drage is leading a £3 million High Court fight to get the national ban on hunting with dogs overturned.

Miss Drage, 45, says she is fighting for her livelihood because she earns all her income by stabling foxhunt horses in her livery yard at Eyeford Hill Farm, near Lower Swell.

She said the yard will close if the challenge, made on Human Rights grounds, fails, rendering her two full-time employees and one part-timer unemployed.

Miss Drage said she cannot afford the high cost of diversifying into leisure riding.

She and 10 others, from throughout Britain, agreed to go to court when asked to do so by the Countryside Alliance, the national organisation campaigning against the ban.

Miss Drage said the alliance chose people whose livelihoods depend on hunting.

Her hearing, expected to last a week, will begin at London's High Court on Monday, July 4.

Hunts nationwide are raising money to meet the costs.

And if the High Court appeal is lost Miss Darge said she would take the fight to the European Court of Human Rights.

Miss Drage fell in love with horses when young and learnt to ride at a saddle club in Cyprus, which was among several places she and her family lived while her father was posted around the world by the Royal Air Force.

Upon returning to Britain, she took up foxhunting after an uncle gave her one of his horses.

She moved to Lower Swell parish in 1981 to become a hunter groom at Eyeford Knoll, a job she applied for after seeing it advertised in Horse and Groom magazine.

After spending nine years there and then 18 months working with carriage horses, she opened her yard 12 years ago.

She annually keeps an average of 20 horses, mainly belonging to Heythrop Hunt members, in her 19 stables and her barn, which can house two horses.

Miss Drage said: "Without running my stables, I couldn't live in my house. "I built the business up myself. It's something I've worked for. "I want to choose when I get to give up, I don't want to be told."