Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere with the rank of captain. The young baron inherited a sizeable estate in the North of England, including land that had been in the Cholmondeley family since 1615 – and the ancestral seat at Vale Royal in the county of Cheshire. The young Lord Delamere made his first trip to Africa in 1891 to hunt lion in British Somaliland, and returned yearly to resume the hunt. In 1894 he was severely mauled by an attacking lion, and was only saved when his Somali gunbearer, Abdullah Ashur, leaped on the lion, giving Delamere time to retrieve his rifle. As a result
Delamere Forest remained wooded well into the 14th century. It retained a population of wild boar and wolves. The remaining part of the southern part of the Forest of Mara remained classed as a hunting forest until 1812 when an Enclosure Act was passed disafforesting the remaining forest (that is, returning its legal status to ordinary land) and transferring ownership of the remnant half to the Crown and half to surrounding major landowners. In April 1821, the King's Bench determined that Delamere was one of four new parishes within the old Forest of Mara during a case about a pauper from Oakmere.