White Horse Pilgrim

Is there no way of ecstacy?

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
    You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
    You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

T S Eliot

Doru and I are alike in a number of ways. Wake me up suddenly, as happens on most workday mornings, and I will stagger around stiffly until I loosen up and attain my normal vigour. Then I remain active all day long, until sleep claims me late in the evening. (Too late usually!)

Likewise, catch Doru when he is lying down asleep (and he does like to lie down after eating his breakfast, his snores resounding through the barn), and he will take a few moments to loosen up.

It really irritates me when the loadmouths and the people with fluffy bunny mentality immediately claim, when I get the horse to his feet and he makes a few stiff strides, that he is "lame" and cannot be worked. We have a few such people at the barn, as well as a barn manager who describes every stiff horse as "crippled". (I'd hate to think what he'd say if he saw me at 7am on a weekday!)

I know that Doru did a bit too much work on asphalt last week to face the Ridgeway flints for a couple of weeks. That is why I am working him with hoof boots, with which he goes forward untroubled.

But there is no arguing with the inexperienced know-alls who believe themselves expert. The next time someone tries to tell me not to ride, rather than explain the situation again, I think that the answer will be "which part of mind your own f***ing business don't you understand?" Perhaps not the best way, however I am running out of patience. After a couple of thousand miles on the trail, I know my horse fairly well.

My chief critic rides a horse with collapsed heels, atrophied frogs, and frighteningly long toes. She admits that he has awful feet, but takes no action.

I wonder how this matter is supposed to enlighten me?

I would love to have my own yard again, or a home with a barn and field, just to be free from the people with more opinions than knowledge. I'd love to share a barn with a few experienced, joyful, kind trail riders - especially if, like me, they are Old Souls.

Incidentally, an ambulance collected another rider from the barn this morning. She had fallen and broken her back. Another accident where a rider thought that they were "safe" because they were wearing a helmet, irrespective of all the other hazards circulating too freely.

I took Doru out in a warm evening of bright colours and low slanting sun. There were sarcastic remarks as I left. The big roan was flawless (apart from over-interest in vegetation). He was sound in all paces after a day out in the field, though we did not push the paces on a chalk ridge baked dry and hard as iron. Would a barefoot horse in the wild hammer about a dry hill in midsummer, other than to escape danger?

I've worked enough horses and dealt with sufficient problems and abuses to have some idea about equine welfare. I've ridden enough miles on the trail to have a bit of an idea concerning when a horse can go, perhaps more slowly, even if he is not 100% fit. (For how many people or horses attain the perfection of 100% fitness?)

This ride did not start with me in the best state of mind. I will suffer beginners, but I do have a problem with meddlers. Interfering annoys me. But events conspired to bring about an improvement in my spirits. I discovered a group of hikers walking the Ridgeway who had run out of water, and was able to take them to the barn to refill their water containers. It is a hot dry place up there, there are no dwellings along the Ridgeway, no streams or ponds on the chalk, and the few field troughs don't provide potable water.

Being able to do a bit of good to fellow travellers lifted my spirits, even as the warm bright evening softened ill feelings.

If my horse is happy, forward going (by his draught horse standards), level and equal on both diagonals, then he is not unsound. Actually he is sounder than me.

Doru spent a while grazing too, for it seems good to allow my horse to partake of the succulent (if a little dessicated in this weather) chalk hill grassland that is so good for the bones.

Plus Doru was not welding borium onto shoes, which seems to have left me with lungs damaged by cobalt amongst other things. It sees that the tasks involved in running that riding centre have wrecked more than my back, have perhaps shaved a few years off my life too? So, inner parts are spoiled too, mimicking the sun-damaged skin on my forearms.

Restraint

Here is Doru, equipped for travel, tied to a gate leading to wild Welsh moorland.

He was tied up briefly because I wished to visit the bushes. I have previously had the experience of a horse that I was holding becoming alarmed by the performance of my large bodily needs. This is a bad situation in which to be dragged several yards forward. Whilst Doru was not the culprit in that situation, I did not wish to offer him the opportunity.

So Doru spent a few minutes restrained by a rope, during most of which he decimated all vegetation within reach in his customary manner as if he were famished. Which of course he was not, as he had been grazed in long lush grass barely half an hour earlier.

Danielle's hair needed restraint too when she wanted to photograph on a windy day. There's no point having a quality camera when one's hair blows across the lens. So I saved the situation and enabled her creativity to flourish unfettered by flailing follicles.

Personally I like to wear a hat. For summer, I have a Transylvanian forester's felt trilby, a rakish hat that demand a feather for greatest effect. But the days when I sported long hair are gone (by about five years). It was good for theatrical effect ("bohemian equestrian guide") but such a lot of work to keep clean and tidy. So, of course, on the trail it wasn't clean and tidy. Better to have the horses well groomed. Fortunately for me, Danielle never saw me at that sartorial nadir.

Free horses

Groups of native ponies are pastured in areas of the Welsh mountains. We met this contented group high up near the Gospel Pass. Danielle and my truck are in the background.

These horses are all owned by people who have grazing rights over the common land. This is a great tract of open land (with a perimeter fence) where residents of particular villages (known as "commoners") can pasture livestock. Details are arranged at meetings of the commoners.

Two horses are obtaining their daily salt needs from the highway authority's bin where some supplies must remain from the previous winter. Others have used the highway signs as a scratching post. How resourceful these horses are.

Amongst the horses are mares and foals. They are quite small, the mares not seeming higher than about 12 to 13 hands, and really not at all valuable. At best, the foals would in due course make rather ordinary children's riding ponies.

These are tough little horses, great survivors, and they need to be up here. Even if there are no natural predators, conditions can be wet, windy and cold. Dun colours and black eel stripes suggest primitive genes. At the same time, the variety of other colours (piebald, dappled and spotted) which are not natural native pony colours suggests that other stallions have been introduced in order to breed more valuable foals. A youngster with one of these more special coat colours (especially piebald) will sell for more money.

Most of the tourists passing by will stop to photograph these small herds of multicoloured horses. They have become a well-known feature of the area. Fortunately they are safe since they are owned rather than feral, don't compete with commercial livestock, and have plenty of grazing and water.

I did not yield to the temptation of allowing Doru to improve their gene pool! Anyway, he was a bit too big for these little mares.

The narrow way

Lengths of the trail were wide and open, and other sections were narrow and hemmed in by vegetation.

There was such a variety of character spread over a week. Here we traversed - remarkably, given the overgrown nature of the place - an old Roman road. This trail had climbed over a bleak hill, plunged through open meadows, then withdrew to a tenuous strip between two thick flower-strewn hedges. It would have been difficult to pass another horse here, or to turn around.

Alternating sun and rain is a fine environment for grass and hedgerows. We benefitted from warm dry days, however it is not always so. A colleague who had been a soldier tells me of many uncomfortable days training on the neighbouring mountain range when always it seemed to rain. But perhaps poor weather makes it easier for soldiers to move stealthily?

We were not stealthy, Doru crashing through the undergrowth whilst I talked to him. It was such a pleasure to be out there, in the warmth and open air. Doru, always hungry, did take the odd nibble from the hedges. One cannot begrudge a travelling horse his snacks, though I prefer to stop him to graze properly from time to time rather than the ill habit of snatching at vegetation. It is remarkable (as the Long Rider Jeremy James told me many years ago) just how much food a travelling horse needs to eat.

Other parts of the route used asphalt roads. This was less welcome, however I was travelling a route planned by someone else. It had the advantage that the accommodations were arranged - and very nice they were too. On reflection, in future I will fit hoof boots to Doru if we are going to do this much riding on asphalt. Whilst he is sound, his soles are quite abraded - he is due a trim next week, and I doubt whether anything will need to come off.

At least the roads were, for the most part, tiny quiet lanes. People drove slowly and, anyway, one might see a motor vehicle only once every half hour (and all driven by courteous country people in my experience). This particular lane went on for several miles and served only a handful of farms. Riding rather than driving, I had the bonus of being able to see over most of the hedges, opening up lovely views across the hills and woods.

I was reminded of just how slow it can be travelling by horse - and how unusual this can be in our modern world. Small details of the passing trail become significant. It's best to be unambitions where distance is involved, to allow plenty of time and not to expect to get far. One needs to see time in a different way, a strange discipline to many of us. It can alarm me how the impatience of modern life tries to manipulate my thoughts and deeds. Out and about, I am tempted to worry about arrival time rather than enjoying the minutiae of the trail and hoping to be out until dusk. Why the artificial deadlines, the perceived need to rush? Why not a long lunch break instead whilst one rests and one's horse grazes? (How wonderful it is to doze in long grass, hearing a horse munching the lush herb.How beautiful to watch him graze, viewed lazily through eyes heavy with sleep, when the world seems to have shrunk to half an acre with just two inhabitants.)

A few miles led through the forest. It seems that one commercial conifer forest is much like another, and this stretch was quite reminiscent of long leagues in Transylvania (without the horse carts, logging debris and litter, anyway). The flies were there too, great swarms of bluebottles that kept up with us even at a canter - so there was no escaping them. But, otherwise, the forest ride was warm and quiet, indeed soporific, reminiscent of that stretch of Mirkwood where Bilbo's companion dwarves became so sleepy.

And then out of the forest, along a track through meadows, across a farmyard where a loose mare and foal stared at us, through a ford where we paused for Doru to drink, and onward into a deep beech wood where light slanted down as if we were underwater and I ducked beneath ancient boughs heavy laden with foliage. Into a strange wild world where, somewhere ahead, supper and a full manger awaited us at a cottage remote and hospitable.

Doru reclining and competing

Each night Doru enjoyed a good soft straw bed, of which he made good use. Here he is resting in a generous box at a quiet farm high in the Welsh mountains. Just out of sight, he had a big net of hay and a water bucket.

Apart from the farmer's horses, there were the inevitable sheep and a rather surprising herd of Highland cattle. The latter, with their great broad horns and long caramel-coloured coats, were a picturesque (and, I gather, profitable) curiosity.

There were chickens too, cheekily competitors with Doru for his morning and evening feeds. They advanced, pecked earnestly, then retreated when Doru pinned back his ears and shook his head at them. It did make a comical sight.

Doru did deserve both his rest and his feed. As well as the miles to be covered, there was considerable climbing involved, as well as tiring negotiation of bad ground. I suppose that the chickens ate only the most miniscule amount, probably just the fragments that fell from his mouth. (That would count as recycling waste. The chickens did, I must admit, produce excellent eggs.)

The terrain does have a sculptural quality, and it was against that backdrop that we travelled. A side trip to the Gospel Pass allowed a little unrushed photography, including this view of a small group of riders out amidst the vastness of this sweeping sandstone landscape. How distant it seems now when Doru and I did that job, leading rides through the enormity of the Carpathian mountains.

Here is a softer, smaller landscape than the mile-high Carpathians, but magnificent nonetheless. It is green, spacious, crossed by a variety of trails, and little over three hours drive from here. Really we are very fortunate.

This particular photo shows a trail that I rode during my first weekend of trail riding, almost two decades ago. Howard had me cantering on the first afternoon, then on the second day we rode over the Gospel Pass and across into the next valley, stopping for lunch at a pub so old-fashioned that it barely had beer-pulls. (Even near Oxford I remember a pub where, back in the late 1980's, an old lady brought the ale out in big jugs to be poured out into clients' glasses.) How rosy-hued and misty the good old days seem now!

Perpetual possibility

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

T S Eliot

Llanbedr Hill provided a great open wilderness, a high moorland pasture where the wind whistled, blueberry and fern bent underfoot, and the remoteness was tangible. Even in good visibility, the featurelessness and multiplicity of tracks made me think about navigation.

At one level, such a space is good for the soul, allowing humdrum cares to fall away like raindrops from a steep roof.

At another level, I was searching for the soul of the place, and did not quite discover it. Perhaps here the memories lie in the inhabited valleys? For these high places bore relics of drove roads and travellers, but not of habitations - no foundations, no hill forts, not even field walls. Maybe I need to make another visit to begin to appreciate the deeper historical atmosphere? Or maybe this always was a place that travellers gladly left, dropping down one hillside or another to a home or a cozy inn?

One could imagine a party of Hobbits crossing such a waste in search of Bree and the Prancing Pony inn, or Aragorn striding through the tussocks on an errand yet with a warm fire and a mug of ale somewhere at the back of his mind. Oh, to journey with them!

The way was stony and we did not make rapid progress, in deference to Doru's recent entry back into work and his being barefoot. There will be more about the latter in a subsequent post, however I did feel that too much of this week-long ride took place on asphalt roads. On reflection, I would use hoof boots were this ride to be repeated. But, as you will read, I have a different format of ride in mind for the future.

As we plodded along, two escarpments reared up one after another. How curious that such a powerful feature should appear so suddenly in a relatively featureless terrain? Like islets sighted from an oceangoing ship, they were sighted, for fleeting moments revealed in detail, then fell behind and soon were forgotten. This green, airy, rolling land did seem a little like an ocean. Perhaps that is why (unfairly, I think, to both sea and moor) Robert Louis Stephenson described the great undulating mass of Rannoch Moor as being as waste as the sea?

There was life, nevertheless, clustered like fugitives in the hollows. Silent and wary, this mare and foal watched us pass.

I had ridden for two days and a half by this point. Doru and I had tired a little, found our travelling pace, settled down on the trail. There is space to journey, time to walk, liberty to think - we are blessed.

On one hand, I have realised - indeed remembered; been reminded - of why I gave up the job of riding full time. After two days, my back was stiff and sore. At night I struggled to find a position comfortable enough to permit me to surrender to sleep. I am too worn out by eight years of that work and somewhere around twenty thousand miles in the saddle to pursue the vocation professionally. In this I am momentarily sad, and yet happy to have gained so much from that unique period: a time varied, in turns joyful and heart rending, inspirational and character building, therefore a gift if I choose to view it as such. Not every gift is immediately recognisable as such.

On the other hand, I have more fully understood - walking Doru in hand by the river Wye, on a hot early afternoon in bright sunshine, through long grass in air that seemed nearly liquid with heat - that I am travelling with a horse. I am not on a riding holiday, indeed I am doing something quite different. I'm travelling with a big roan stallion who is my companion. It's quite different to a riding holiday - our progress and indeed our fates are bound together as we share moments of joy, satisfaction, frustration, and problems. We both feel the warm west wind and that from the north, the sun and rain, heat and cold. We travel together, get tired, rest, he grazes whilst I sleep in the long grass. I lead him to save his energy even as I expend mine. We travel together as companions. And this seems better, more satisfying, indeed more real than simply having a horse in order to climb a hill or gallop across the turf, to obtain a thrill, to buy the commodity of riding. More real, yes, and more of a challenge to me to match up to the rigours of being a horseman.

Here we are walking down from Llanbedr Hill to the river Wye. I don't necessarily lead Doru like that, from way out in front, however it's difficult to photograph one's led horse other than at the extremity of the split reins. Doru's quizzical look is special and typical.

This realisation, that I am travelling with a horse - which I knew in my heart - informs how I travel. In antithesis to equine sport, I am aiming neither for speed nor distance. Of course it may be necessary to cross a certain mountain simply to reach shelter, requiring a particular distance to be covered on that day. But, in general, I am becoming inclined towards shorter distances and richer days. I am seeking time and space to appreciate travelling with Doru, to enjoy the views, to let him graze, to speak to people, to let Doru pick a good way for his bare feet. I have not become unambitious, only that I am moving beyond mere statistics: how far, how long. This was not a perfect ride, for overnight stays were fixed in advance (and on two occasions further away than I would have wished), but it was an inspirational ride and one that will help guide what Doru and I shall do in future.

Green hill country holiday

It has been a pleasant and varied week in the Welsh hills. We journeyed through inviting green hill country, across wild open moors, past remote hamlets, across clear rivers, in a pastoral land where life moves slowly.

Getting to the start point, the roads got smaller and smaller. A large motorway (like an interstate or autobahn) became a dual carriageway main road, then a single carriageway road. The road began to twist and turn through the growing hills, it narrowed through villages, and then we left it behind. A secondary road wound intimately through the tumbled landscape, then we quit it for a lane barely wide enough for truck and trailer. Wheels on both sides brushing the vegetation, we arrived at the comfortable guesthouse where we would spend the first night.

The riding was mixed, and this and the following few posts will cover my experiences and Doru's.

On the first day I had the good fortune to be accompanied part-way by my hostess, which both gave me someone to talk to and eliminated the need for any map reading on my part until well after lunch. My hostess might have wondered whether I would make it from where she left me to the end, however I have a good eye for topography after years of guiding in a place where most maps were rudimentary at best. In fact the topography was simple enough: a mass of sandstone headlands forming an eroded west-facing rampart, below which a heavily disessected jumbled land fell away riven by deep stream-cut valleys. At the foot of all that, the wide valley of the river Wye meandered. Easy on a clear day, doubtless trickier in low cloud or mist. However we were blessed by a clear day, warm and tranquil.

It took a steep climb not unlike those of former days in Tranylvania to reach the top of an outlying prow of the escarpment - one of those climbs where one stands in the stirrups and leans forward. The space on top forms a great expanse of common grazing, where sheep and native ponies thrive in summer. Here we met a group of mares and foals, who crept just out of our way. They are tiny creatures, perhaps twelve hands or thereabouts, and indeed the foals look small enough to pick up and take home!

This was a good terrain for fast work on soft, springy ground. However, being aware that Doru had only just come back into work, we were admirably restrained and worked him only gently. He isn't a fast horse at the best of times, being sturdy and sure-footed rather than speedy. My host's mare is a Fell pony, a little quicker than Doru, sure-footed too, like the big stallion adapted for steady, reliable work.

Here is a nice shot of the pretty black Fell mare at our lunch stop in the hollow where a spring bubbles out of the stones surprisingly close to the top of the hill. These are the sorts of places that local knowledge, or perhaps a bit of intuition, yields to the traveller. Other than occasional springs and a handful of dewponds, the plateau is a dry place, quite short of places where a beast might drink.

I did gently get rebuked at work a week ago for admitting to applying intuition - to which I had a response. There is a role for informed intuition, knowing the lie of the land and the geology, knowing the people at work and what tricks some of them get up to (certain contractors come to mind), that can lead one at least to point in the right direction. At last, a benefit from being a little bit older. (I told colleagues that I came to the project ready-aged!) But anyway I have seen a lot of trails and many hills, if fewer horses than some and less of the world than others.

Doru, let us remember, is a stallion. He was accompanying a mare who was, for the most part, alongside or in front. Knowing how he is, especially when a little tired by work, I was not surprised when the most interest that he showed in the mare was a display of Flehmen and a couple of whinneys. I do like to ride a trustworthy horse.

The route dropped down a steep slope where I led Doru. I think that a sharp descent is quite hard enough on a horse without having to carry a rider too unless there is a good reason for staying on top. Doru was not so tired that he didn't try to start a nipping game on the way down, momentarily forgetting that I was not a fellow horse, however a tap over the muzzle from the end of the long reins by which I was leading him put a stop to that! Nipping play is a favourite of his, generally on the way out to the field when he is a bit fresh, and not something that I put up with.

We continued through the bracken below the escarpment. This view does not really give a sense of the height and majesty of these rocks - which might, in an arid land devoid of vegetation, be the setting for a Western movie. The colours would be splendid - even the soil here is a surprising reddish shade.

Bracken is a curious plant, rather a weed, and invasive of grassland. This is common land, and those local people with common rights are allowed to cut bracken to dry for use as animal bedding. Though straw, shavings and hemp are in wide use, some people do still cut bracken. It seems like a trade-off between the cost of buying bedding and the labour of cutting and drying it - somewhat illustrating the difference between modern farming and its peasant predecessor. Yet this is an outlying region, and not every animal keeper is flush with money, so the old way has its merits too.

On our own, Doru and I negotiated a tract of sheep country followed by a sharp descent to a stream. After crossing a tiny bridge, we set off up a stony track, almost a seasonal watercourse, that would not have been out of place in our old Transylvanian haunts. The end of that vertiginous rocky way led straight into a farmyard, the very farm where we (and Danielle) would be spending the night. It was a welcome arrival.

Doru spent a welcome couple of hours grazing before being put in a stable for the night where he ate a good feed of alfalfa and barley then slept like a foal, on his side with all four legs stretched out together. For my part, I slept in a room overlooking the stable where, for the first time in my life, I could see my horse whilst I lay in bed. That was a rare pleasure. And when the great horse awoke, Danielle and I could hear his whinneys too, and the replies of the farmer's two geldings.

Lying still at last, I reflected. It is the day after the midsummer solstice, a day blessed by long hours of daylight. For the first time in a decade, I am riding alone: no group of tourists to look after, no-one who has paid me anything for a service. Just Doru and I , and the green hill country of southeast Wales (and, of course, Danielle driving my truck by road). Eastward the near sandstone hills rear up, westward the valley falls away to the feet of more distant hills, above the sky is crowded with marching, metamorphosing cloud ramparts. I am away on another journey.

What a joy it is to be amongst the mountains again! Not my familiar old mountains, but nevertheless a friendly inhabited landscape of small farms, thick hedges, gnarled trees, and smooth sweeping hill pastures. Save for calling sheep and chirping birds - and occasional whinneys from Doru - all is silent. There are no aeroplanes and, high up here, no vehicles disturb us. At last I can unwind, forget the work that has paid for this excursion, appreciate the extensive view and clean air, the wide sky and varied horizon.

I am on the trail again with a good horse. There is much to be joyful about, many things to see, lessons to learn, people to meet, experiences to receive, reports to pass on. How wonderful this all is.

On the road

We shall be off in the morning - Danielle, Doru, Mina and I. Hence I shall bid farewell to readers for a week that, very likely, will fly past as good times tend to do - a flash of activity that leaves a happy memory.

The rolling mountains shall be as still waters to me, the springy meadows like a soft bed in which to sleep long and deeply, the tangled woods like strengthening food, the wide sky a draught of refreshing drink.

Now, to sleep so that I may be ready in the morning. My gear is packed (and what a pile it is!), vehicle and trailer prepared, Doru apparently fit, hay and feed awaiting. New horizons await, new trails, and new people. I am excited.

Down the passage, towards the door

We are preparing to go away for a week, Danielle and I with Doru. As ever before a journey, I feel that strange mixture of excitement and inertia. One anticipating the pleasure of exploration, the other a faint shudder at the unknown. Excitement shall win, for I want to want to journey:

Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened

This is the simple journey into the mountains close to home that I never took because my eyes were turned afar, with my wife (though previously I found it hard to settle down with another), with a straightforward horse that once I would have overlooked. There is a circularity to all this journeying:

In my beginning is my end...

However I am circling upward, like a sailplane in a thermal current. At last, akin to a pilot more skilled or more fortunate, I have discovered (or chanced upon) an updraught. As I rise higher, I see further, more clearly, with more hope.

In fact I shall be riding near to the very place, Capel-y-ffin, where I rode trail for the very first time nearly twenty years ago. Another circularity, a return to meaningful terrain. After riding a distance equivalent to a circumnavigation of the globe, how will those low green hills, rough meadows and muddy paths look? Strangely familiar, I suspect.

I wish that old Howard who once operated the riding centre at the now-closed youth hostel were around still. But now he is retired and travelling. How I would have liked to ride up and show him that, from a small beginning, I too had become a trail guide and a halfway competent long distance rider.

If someone had visited me at my riding centre, telling how their trip had led to a bigger adventure with horses, I would have been thrilled. Perhaps there are such people, persuaded by a wild ride in Transylvania to become horsemen and women? It seems likely that there are a few.

So, even as Howard's legacy lives on - a door that I did open - so most likely does my smaller legacy. It is a pleasure and a privilege to have been able to change lives for the better. It's another circularity too, from his life to mine, from my life to others.

In two days we shall be off, away for a week, far from here: a welcome break after months of hard work, only my third holiday in ten years, the first time since the 1990s that I will have simply gone riding for pleasure for days on end.

At last, once more to travel for the pleasure of travelling. And there again:

We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion

Footfalls echo in the memory

The past few days have provided a little bit of a sense of deja vu - a reminiscence of a former life far away yet intimate in the experiences that it has yielded.

When I had a stable full of working horses, most of them needed for work, moments arose when I had to decide whether or not to let a horse work. Soundness and fitness to work are not necessarily clear-cut decisions.

I've had a horse stumble at the end of a day's ride and come up lame. I bandaged the offending limb and stood him in a cold mountain stream for half an hour, gave him a shot of bute, and walked him to the place where we would be staying overnight. Next morning there would be a decision whether or not to ride the horse on.

There were cases where horses suffered insect bites on their backs overnight, and were ridden home using saddle blankets with holes cut in strategic places.

Now I am back in familiar if not entirely welcome territory, having decided that Doru is fit to go on holiday next week.

There is an element of judgment in such decisions, and an element of chance too. I could not see what had gone wrong inside the big roan (and nor could the vet.) So I am assessing that Doru is sound again, and that he is merely a tiny bit uneven because the muscles in one hindquarter are slightly wasted. (Indeed perhaps I imagine unevenness because, subconsciously, I seek it?) He moves forward willingly enough, is sounder than I am, and always was a horse who started off slowly on a ride. The first couple of miles tended to be leisurely at best, and this was not a sign of any ailment. Actually, it was more common sense and experience when a lengthy mountain ride beckoned.

I believe too that a barefoot horse will react more perceptively to ground conditions (which are hard and flinty at present) than a shod horse. Doru is more in touch with his surroundings than a horse with a layer of steel and impaired proprioception (let alone deficient hoof function) masking what is underfoot. That does not mean that the ground hurts Doru, simply that he is more aware of the terrain that he moves over and reacts accordingly.

I am looking forward to going away. After only two holidays in a decade, I had forgotten the keen sense of anticipation that accompanies a long awaited trip. Well, in six days time we shall be off, God willing; myself, Danielle, Doru, and Mina the dog.