Individually customised equine memories
Where it began
A fortnight before I was born my Mom saw a foal born on a stud farm, and she always said that the experience sealed the fate that the animal I was most passionate about would be a horse. Before I could walk, I always wanted to be picked up to pat any horse, pony or donkey I could reach. By the time I was 6 (the earliest the riding school took children) I was having riding lessons. By the time I was 8 my long-suffering parents decided they could take the nagging no longer, that when we were on holiday, I still wanted to be able to ride so they took the plunge in their late 30’s and both learned to ride. My Dad fell hook line and sinker and was a very competent, brave and if somewhat rustic on occasions rider. Dad had two gears on his horses stand or flat out. My Mom also a very competent but very exact rider, who did all the schooling and loved the precision of precise halt or a snappy leg yield. From both of these I learned the joy of schooling and the wild abandonment of jolly good gallop across the field or down the bridle path.
My first horse
When I was 10 my Dad decided we would have a family horse and one Saturday, Lady a 16.2hh thoroughbred turned up in a trailer. We soon found out that a horse that Dad could ride and control, was somewhat a handful for a 10-year-old skinny kid. It was fortunate that my riding instructor at the time fell in love with Lady and bought her from us. Dad not to be thwarted then bought Henry who still at 16hh was a lot steadier, but as a 5-year-old was extremely green. My Mom had a great summer schooling Henry but sadly he was still not going to be the horse for all of us, so again Henry was sold to a fantastic lady who had lots of fun doing dressage with him. Never daunted Dad had now decided we should be a two-horse family and so Betsy a 16.3hh hunter who had been there and done it all and Rusty 13hh Thelwell turned up. The rest as they say is history and we have never been without horses in our family since.
I have been extremely fortunately throughout my life to have had the privilege to own and know amazing equines. I decided to have a photo wall of horses through my life. All the years since those first horses I have kept a shoe from each of them, and I decided it was only fitting that their hoof prints should walk the wall also, having left footprints of memories in my life. When I told my sister what I was doing I said that I was just going to get the rust off them (some of them now being over 35 years old!!) and paint them silver, to which her suggestion was well why not paint them in the colour of the numnahs they were always ridden in.
RACING HOOVES IS BORN
This got me thinking, particularly for our competition horses, and about their shoes painted in their racing/competition colours. And so Racing Hooves was born.