In my quest to give Tissy the retirement she deserves I have been researching new places to ride within an hour of the yard. Tissy finds hacking at home boring, she loves a new place to explore and really comes alive when she has fresh pastures to conquer! She still endures the odd hack out at home, I tell her she needs to do some boring fitness work so that she can go to pony parties, in reality she doesn’t need much work to happily bimble around a 16km, but still, a bit of preparation makes me feel better.
I’m aiming for one outing a month between March & November, so if anyone has any suggestions then please send them my way, we live near Uttoxeter so our access to the A50, M6, M1 & M42 are pretty good!
This time we headed to Acton Hall Equestrian centre for their Park & Ride. It’s £5 per horse, you’re paying for the parking facilities rather than the ride. The route is all on public land through some lovely woods with a mix of sandy tracks and fire road. When you book on you get a talk around and a little map but it’s fairly straight forward to get to the woods and have an explore.
We did about 10km but you could easily add on more tracks and loops to up the distance. Tissy wasn’t the epitome of a well behaved experienced endurance pony…she wanted to explore at full speed and was very cross about the restrictions placed upon her by her (in her opinion) overly cautious rider!
Nevertheless, we both had a lovely time and it’s definitely an option to come back for training in the future.
Beth Endurance 