Ever since I was seven years old, and I won my first rosette at a village gymkhana, I have had a passion for horses and the countryside. The two were inseparable, giving me a sense of freedom and being at one with an animal.
As I grew older and was allowed to explore further afield, I would imagine people who had ridden along the tracks I used, like the Pilgrims’ Way and a sunken path used to transport coffins to the church from the outlying villages.
Later, when I moved to Wiltshire, I found myself in a place where reminders of the importance of what had happened there in the past abounded, too. Outside Calne, on the Bath road, you’ll find Labour-In-Vain Hill, a name that invokes weary horses struggling up the gradient.
So I was drawn by the title of Tiffany Francis-Baker’s book. It wasn’t quite what I expected. It’s far more than a guidebook to Britain’s bridlepaths or an exercise in – what I now know is called – geomorphology.
Rather, it’s a eulogy to the relationship between human and horse, and what we can learn from it.
Told in self-contained chapters, it covers such things as the role of the outdoors in improving mental health, horses as an inspiration for artists and their role as beasts of burden. At one point, Francis-Baker and another mother of a baby girl reflect on the lessons a herd of Exmoor mares with foals at foot can teach us about human familial relationships.
A committed environmentalist, she has an elegiac style. She describes the 5,000-year-old Ridgeway path as ‘moulded and padded by foot, hoof and paw, as one generation after another travelled along it’. (She doesn’t mention the ruts made more recently by motorcycle enthusiasts.)
The link horses provide with our past is a recurring theme. She goes back to the origins of the relationship between humans and horses, when Neolithic hunters ate horses. Judging by their cave paintings, it was Bronze Age man who first rode them.
Centuries later, the Romans were probably the first to use them for sport. Today, York Racecourse is close to where the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus introduced horse-racing to this country in 208 AD.
Since then, horses have gone through numerous evolutions, with intensive breeding started by the Arabs in Spain in the eighth or ninth century. Centuries later, according to Francis-Baker, a German zoologist became so obsessed with genetics that he attempted to recreate an extinct breed of truly wild horses suitable for the pure Aryan race.
For centuries, of course, transport depended on horses. Vast numbers were sent to the battlefields – and died there. One of the many literary sources the author quarries is a poem by Henry Chappell, A Soldier’s Kiss, illustrating the depth of the bond between horses and their riders. The final moments of a mortally wounded horse are witnessed by a soldier who, under enemy fire, risks his own life to kneel by his dying companion’s side:
Only a dying horse! He swiftly kneels, Lifts the limp hea, and hears the shivering sigh, Kisses his friend, while down his cheek there steals Sweet pity’s tear: ‘Goodbye, old man, goodbye.’
That relationship survives today, not just in the passion of little girls for their ponies but in whole communities. One of the chapters I enjoyed most was on gypsies, based on Francis-Baker’s visit to the Wickham Horse Fair, a favourite of mine.
Horses, usually black and white and the hairier the better, are ‘flashed’ through the normally sedate town, with sparks flying from their hooves. Bundles of notes change hands, raising the question as to why gypsies buy so many horses, given that they are largely redundant for transport.
She quotes the gypsy film-maker and author Damian Le Bas, as saying they are a link not just with each other, but with their past.
For others, they are pets or status symbols. It’s a lot more satisfying investing your cash in a horse that you can watch in a field than putting it under the bed or in the bank.
She also visits Knepp Estate in Sussex. It’s famous for abandoning intensive-farming methods, and rewilding the land by letting native species such as Exmoor ponies graze there. It’s part of what the author hopes is a growing trend towards conservation grazing. It could shape the landscape in future, as horses did in the past.
Tiffany Francis-Baker has put in a great deal of research and evokes the sites and sounds of the countryside beautifully. Occasionally she meanders off down byways – but that is what horses and riders do.
