Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever grow out of the horsey phase, every time I go past a horse in the car and someone is with me I’ll go ‘Look a horse’, if we’re on a walk and a horse comes up to us I’ll spend ages giving it pats and telling it how lovely it is. I’m forever being reminded ‘You know you have 3 of these at home right?’.
I just love them, I love the life I have because of them. I love that I spend hours a day outside, that I have a responsibility that I can’t duck out of, if I don’t want to go to the gym at 6am, I hit snooze and don’t go. If I have to be up at 5am to put Tissy out in winter I will do it without fail every single day. I mean that also has a flip side if you’re not feeling great, you just want to hide on the sofa, you have no choice but to go out and do the chores but I never regret the time spent at the yard.
Going to Belvoir Castle’s Festival of the Horse was so much fun. From quadrille, classic dressage and trick riding to knights and tiny ponies in the scurry. It was wonderful to have a public moment remembering and saluting The Queen. It was great to see horses doing so many different activities, displaying their versatility and also constantly wondering why an animal so large gives us all they’ve got and are so loyal, loving and trainable.
I thoroughly enjoyed the mischievous Belvoir hounds, who were running around creating chaos, stealing burgers but my highlight has to be Ben Atkinson and his team. The stunt riders were incredible and I’d really love to have a go but his liberty act stole the show. How anyone can ask 9 horses to do different things in a huge grass arena without any tack is beyond me. What I enjoyed even more was watching when things didn’t entirely go to plan, how he asked the horses to come back and do as he wanted, there was such a sense of conversation between him and them. They were doing it because they could and they wanted to but you knew that they always had the option to say no, to just walk off, it was an extraordinary atmosphere.
Beth Endurance 