White Horse Pilgrim

In the flesh

The proof copy of The Riding Holiday centre Handbook arrived this morning. Here it is, not yet heavily fingered. But it will be thumbed throughout as I check the text one last time. There's always that last typo...

I am excited. In fact quite thrilled. After three years of work the result is here, tangible, weighty, there to pick up and flick through just whenever I feel like doing so. My ego feels a little more polished than a few days ago.

There is a sense of closure in all this too. I have recorded almost all that I learnt during eight challenging years running an equestrian business in a difficult environment. Now I feel that I have truly passed on the baton. I'm not hanging onto wisdom that I can share. Whatever youngster is trying to tread my footsteps, he or she will not be walking alone. The next traveller on my trail has a scrap of a map and a bit of a helping hand. For me that's the best part. It's not as if an equestrian book is going to make me rich or famous. (And fame, as T E Lawrence put it, is like dragging around a clattering tin can.)

The next thing is to get on with the marketing. It's a bit of a niche book. However there are students at equestrian colleges to aim for. There are dreamers like I used to be - so the book will need a blog or website to attract attention to itself. My co-author goes around the equestrian trade shows, travel fairs and events, so she can hawk copies and garner interest. Perhaps there are places to get the book reviewed. I'll be grateful for any suggestions.

The Riding Holiday Centre Handbook - a preview

My new co-authored book The Riding Holiday Centre Handbook has now reached the printing of a final proof copy for one last check. It's been a long road to reach this penultimate step, beginning with a mass of writing during the Summer of 2008 after I closed my former riding holiday business. Here's a preview of the cover.

The book itself has come out at 365 pages and covers each aspect of that complex venture, a riding holiday business. I have written around two thirds of the book, and the remainder was contributed by Wendy Hofstee, founder and managing director of Unicorn Trails.

After the final read through has been completed, the book will be available print-on-demand at a sale price of around £15 Sterling / $25US. I'll publish details of how to buy a copy.

It's peculiar, perhaps, to be publishing a book that I needed fifteen years ago when setting up a riding holiday business. However at least I can pass on a wealth of knowledge to anyone else brave enough to attempt what I tried and - whilst I remained physically sound - made something of a success of.

Late ride

With trailering at both ends, a two-hour ride means that I will be away from home for up to four hours. So, having left work at 5pm with an hour's journey home, it was going to be a late trip.

We set off with the sun setting golden at our backs, entering a quiet green landscape that embraced our disappearance from the world beyond.

In rolling sinuous valleys the air was cool and fresh. The chalk track glowed bright in the deepening shadow. Then back to the ridge as the orange sun slipped below a horizon decorated with filigree trees.

We arrived back at the trailer after the mid-summer sun had set, the world becoming grey with rising gloom. In near-darkness I returned Brena to her field, and got home in inky blackness.

Trilogies of value

After two days away at a conference I am glad to be home.

I had to speak about "how to demonstrate value for money" which is not quite as easy as it sounds. To begin with it is a mistake to conflate cheapness and value. This error is common in Britain, the more so in these days of consciously enforced austerity.

Elements of value form a type of trilogy: obvious items that can be measured; some that can be estimated more or less roughly; and a few that simply don't reduce to monetary terms. What is a visually attractive public building worth compared to one that is dull? However I would like to think that well designed things can work better and not necessarily cost very much more.

After dinner I enjoyed the pleasure of another trilogy: Miklos Banffy's Transylvanian Trilogy. I love these books which seem to exude the rare gift of speaking personally to me.

As a reviewer put it: the sublime descriptions of Balint Abady’s journeys through the bewitching landscapes of Transylvania and his “sense of wonder and enchantment” at its limitless plains and high mountains, dense forests and lush meadows, where nature serves as a balance and restorative to the harsh vicissitudes of the human world.

That's it. When I lived in Transylvania nature served as just such a counterpoint to the challenges and frustrations of daily life. When my link to the mountains and woods began to be severed then life in that province ceased to provide pleasure and meaning. Such is the price of back trouble that curtails riding.

Like Banffy's hero Balint Abady I tried to change things for the better but could not swim against a flow of life powerful and inexorable. Against that background it is easy to seek solace in memorable journeys across lovely landscapes.

Abady of course had the added attraction of whichever countess he happened to be having an affair with at that moment. But, be honest, how romantic is it to ride out across beautiful hills, ford a river and pass through quiet woods on a summer evening on the way to an assignation?

I used to dream of riding out to a homely traveller's inn where I could stable my horse and meet friends. Perhaps my imagination should have been more ambitious?

I've written about the things that can be measured precisely, roughly or not at all. On reflection it was the bad things about Transylvania that seemed easiest to enumerate and weigh. The good things - the nature, beauty and fun - were the hardest to measure. Most were unquantifiable, reducing at best to vague descriptions that slipped through the mind like water through fingers - refreshing but impossible to grasp. Weighing bad and good is like comparing apples and oranges. The bad exists undeniably. But the good is real too. the good cannot wipe out the bad. However nor can the bad deny that joy given by the good. It's a matter of which one chooses to focus upon.

Editing

I've edited the first thirty pages of a three hundred and fifty page book.

Overall the text is quite good and the facts are all there. Mostly it's a matter of rearranging a small proportion of sentences and eradicating a flock of stray commas.

Good writing is based on the crafting of sentences. That is pure methodology, whether one writes fact or fiction.

The remainder is content. For a text book content means crafting a plan and then filling it with detail. Creative writing is another skill altogether.

At the very beginning I wrote:

When I set out to establish a new riding holiday centre I searched in vain for a comprehensive textbook to guide me. For horse care and management in a foreign environment I depended on the most recent edition of that tried and tested text, "Horsemanship and Horsemastership", published back in the 1940s at The Cavalry School, Fort Riley, Kansas. Managing horses on the trail being akin to taking horses on campaign it was (and remains) an apposite work. Other books dealt with such diverse elements as hoof care, repairing tack, and constructing stables. However looking after horses and their equipment represents only a part of the outfitter’s trade. There were gaps in the literature. I found no text that dealt directly with the skills of the equestrian guide. Trail planning remained an unexplained art. Little was available regarding the economics, commercial management or marketing of an equestrian business. No author had brought together that eclectic mix of information necessary to set up and operate a successful riding holiday centre.

My co-author and I are going to fill that gap. But first I need to get the final editing out of the way. Then I can upload the work to a print on demand service and my co-author can get on with the marketing.

Houses with stables

Sandra mentioned Dutch farmhouses where horses share the same roof as their humans. The old barn at my former home in Transylvania was made like that. People lived in the part to the left whilst the stable was on the right. (The new section to the very right with dark brown wood is a later addition. Likewise those structures to the very left.)

In the middle is a barn open to the roof where carts, ploughs and the like would have been stored. This was also used for access to spaces above the living quarters and the stable where hay was stored. That made it easy to throw hay down and pass it through access hatches into the mangers. The hefty timber structures supporting reinforced ceilings run along below the eaves.

The large doors to the barn are original however the window to the living quarters seems to have been reduced in size. I fitted a wider door to the stable as the original was too narrow for a large horse.

Here is another such building, a little ramshackle but still used as a summer dwelling. Here the back of the building is shown. The entrances face the hill. A hatch for throwing out manure is visible.

There were still a few such dwellings inhabited year-round in the village too. I remember a new one built less than a decade ago by a shepherd who was somewhat of a traditionalist. Some neighbours also lived in a dwelling of this type. On a winter visit I discovered that their living room, though small, could be kept very warm indeed. In a society where much time was spent outside it was the norm to over-heat the communal room with a powerful log-burning stove. When temperatures were bitter outside (below -20C/-5F) this was welcome.

I discovered another advantage, the living room, barn and stable being interconnected via doors: it was a lot easier to visit a privy in the barn than to trudge across a snowy yard.

Three years ago

Reminiscence can be a sign that one has nothing new to say.

There is some truth in the statement. A spiritual quest can be enormously draining. Hence yesterday's deep sleep in the open, more sleep today, and a difficulty real as a stone wall in focussing on anything more complex than the basics of work and horse care.

This is a time to dig deep foundations, grow roots, and be patient.

Anyway here is Doru ready for work three summers ago. We did work him hard back then, and the beast has earned the easier life that he enjoys nowadays. Like me, he has space now to heal and grow.

This washed out photo was taken shortly after the first, and not many miles away.

That's not Doru grazing below but Lee, another roan. She was making the most of a diet of blueberry bushes and dwarf pine whilst I sat on a very remote rocky outcrop.

It was a place that I both loved and was frustrated by. The view was wonderful - in most directions. (I tried not to look at the huge derelict mine on a facing hillside.) It was very quiet, and the path (a "national hiking trail") was tough and clogged by overgrown vegetation. But one could find the way simply by following a stream of litter.

As with most things in that country, if one looked in the most favourable direction and ignored anything disagreeable then - temporarily - life really could seem quite picturesque.

But it's curious how some problems recur anywhere. One of the barn staff has become unreliable through drinking, and thrice have I found her asleep in a stall wrapped in a horse blanket. At least my peasant staff lived nearby and would crawl home to expire. (Which one of them did with monotonous frequency. Well do I remember visiting his home across the road to discover his prostrate groaning form lurking beneath sweaty blankets.)

Here is the view back to my home. I lived in the far middle distance, below the mountain which sits almost exactly in the centre of the picture.

I did enjoy sitting in such high places and working out where each trail ran. There were places from where a knowing eye could discern nearly the whole course of a week-long hundred mile ride.

I have a feeling for topography. One needed it, for the view can be deceptive. Ridges curve around to hide one waypoint behind another. The viewer's altitude makes a moderate peak seem small.

Then there was the joy of gazing down in evening to watch the low sun glint golden upon the sweep of some distant river, and in such moments life seemed well and trouble far away.

More books

My previous post prompted a descent upon my library, a voracious foraging of the literary flesh there present. Archaic books, there are, some as much as two hundred years old. However I have settled upon two tomes more recent, from 1957 and 1990. Each epitomises a late recording of that which is obsolescent yet beautiful.

This may seem like a post in two halves, for one part will interest some, whilst the other part may yet intrigue others. Well, so be it, such is the material.

Never mind, I'll be onto horses in a bit. I can only keep away from them for so long!

The first of the two books is the Handbook for Steam Locomotive Enginemen, an official publication for drivers and firemen. Mine is a pristine example, probably published around the end of steam traction and placed in a store room rather than issued.

This is another time capsule of long-disappeared technology. Or is it? A recent post recorded just such a piece of technology at work, well able to slip in between the express trains of today. The first picture included with this post refers exactly to King Edward I. That locomotive may be eighty years old, but can still move five hundred tons at ninety miles an hour by burning some coal shovelled by a man onto a fire. Empires were created on the basis of such technology.

The other book, printed just two decades ago, is the Romanian army manual of horse management. It is the product of a time of austerity, both in its poor printing and in the very fact that an army - soon to join NATO with its horses - was not fully mechanised.

I remember seeing around 2002 a horse-drawn army vehicle - painted in camouflage - being driven by two soldiers on their way to collect rations. I don't have a photo, for one had to be careful with a camera in those days. It was only two years since I was tailed by the Secret Police, and my phone was being tapped still. Friends had their offices ransacked. Paranoia lurked at large in that disturbed land - and still does. But the scene had a cinematic quality, to my Western mind.

The army manual included details of brands, rather optimistically given that the army used home-grown crossbred mountain horses for its work. They were good horses, but not spectacular in their breeding.

But look on the third and fourth lines, amongst the Arabians, Lipizzaners and derivatives. There are the Huzul, splendid mountain horses that I knew so well. There are the Prislop, Goral, Pietrosu, Hroby and Ousor that so typify that region. By region, of course I indicate a great swathe of the Carpathian range covering modern-day Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine, for the Huzul supremely is a Habsburg breed. I love those tough little horses. How many miles did I cover upon my wonderful little Prislop mare, who was recorded in the stud book as "record quality" - but was sold to me for 300 euro because the stud had no cash to pay salaries. Now she is a brood mare in Hungary, and I hope that she produces fine progeny. I wonder, for I encountered her full sister, who was nothing special. But she was like a Kyrgyz horse, tough and strong beyond her size, brave and spirited. A throwback, maybe, but a sign nevertheless of that which each of us carries within us. A symbol that our worth may be in what we do, or it may partly be in the achievements of our progeny. I miss that mare, and I wish that I had been better equipped to appreciate her worth. But I did my best, and what more could I do deprived of friends and mentors in a foreign land?

Books

It is a pleasure to receive a compliment about my library. It had grown over three decades, with an eight-year hiatus whilst I lived abroad, numbering now approaching a thousand volumes. Much pleasure does that library bring, how wonderful to be able to extract a volume from the diverse collection at will. Now it covers a whole wall of my office, and has spread out onto a second wall. Long may it flourish and grow.

Here are two of my favourite books. Each accompanied me to Transylvania, and each was a valuable teacher. I knew little back then, and much was there to learn from the Cavalry and from the endurance riders. I owe a great debt to the men who prepared the first book, and to Linda Tellington Jones for the second.

The latter book is an autographed first complete edition. When I made the purchase in a shop in London, I had no idea of whom the author was, nor that she had signed the book. Now I know, and this book is precious to me, bearing the mark of a lady whom I admire and respect.

Later I managed to acquire an original 1944 edition of Horsemanship and Horsemastership, from which the Cavalry Manual above is a reprint. This is a fascinating relic of an era when horses were an integral part of ordinary life in a way barely imaginable today.

I'm not sorry that horses no longer serve the military beyond the purely ceremonial, not after the millions sent to suffer and die in pursuit of human squabbles. Nor do I regret the passing of horses from mass agriculture and transport, for the farmers and carters kept the humane societies busy. But the mass of skill and knowledge built up by the more able and thoughful horsemen and women through history never ceases to interest - from a lucid beginning with Xenophon.

Modern books do have a better presentation, however I like this old chart showing comparative anatomy. Isn't it curious how the lower limb of the horse's foreleg equates to the human hand? The very paper upon which this drawing appears is yellowed with age, a little fragile now, signs of its antiquity. Soon there will be none left who remember the cavalry units of the Anglo-Saxon world, leaving this artefact an orphan.

But I have witnessed gun horses in Romania, where the army fully mechanised only about five years ago. I have a copy of their military horsemanship manual too, slimmer and more poorly printed than Western equivalents, yet a time capsule alike. Seeing those units exercise, it was was if one had stumbled upon a film set, or a historical re-enactment society. Some of them appeared in the film Cold Mountain, which was shot locally.