6 July 2009

The hot weather has cooled a little here in Northern England. My honeysuckle hedge has nearly gone over, and the midges which lurk in its trumpet shaped blossoms are also fewer, so Ruby is happier, although still going out to graze wearing her "fly-armour" - and still scratching a bit overnight in the stable.

David "I just enjoy the challenge" Trotter, who introduces horses to harness at Tebay, came over yesterday morning with a driving pad, an old Cottage Craft type made of webbing with a steel tree. He'd been long reining a mare and she'd spun round on him and snapped off one terret. Could Graham and I replace the terret? We said yes, as although I don't do harness repairs commercially any more (are you listening Mr Tax Man?) David still asks me to keep his gear usable.

So off he went homeward, and Graham took the pad out the the workshop. When he began to drill the brass foot out of the socket it threaded itself right through into the padding, so I ended up fishing with long nosed pliers for this loose lump of brass. Luckily the pair of terrets I still had in the leftover stock had the same thread, and I asked Graham to cut the feet short so they wouldn't make pressure points under the pad. (I'd noticed a few months ago that when David put the pad onto one of his visiting horses, it had flinched a little and resisted in its neck when he girthed up. There was the reason.)

It was by then early afternoon and Ruby was still in the stables, having eaten up her soaked hay and begun to get bored with swinging the connecting door to and fro. The return of the pad would be a good excuse for a decent drive out.

On Saturday she had been lively, not really naughty but keen and inclined to express her joie de vivre by bursting into canter. I thought, a trip over the 4 miles of hill to David's would be ideal for sobering her up a little. So I fastened the mended pad up tightly with its own straps, tied it to the carriage seat, and with Ruby in a surprisingly calm frame of mind we set off over Pikestoll, the big hill to the south, en route to Tebay.

Did I say the weather had cooled? It rained and we got pretty wet going over the top! I decided that if the sun came out by the time we got to Tebay, we'd do the "round trip" and come home via Orton, reasoning that the Sunday car drivers would have no excuse for not seeing us in our fluorescent gear and with our twinkling bike lights. If the rain carried on, I'd turn round and come home over Pikey because it has far less traffic (little to none).

Ruby was interested in the pony mares and foals in fields along the way but the gradients soon made her concentrate. She's got her "haytime runny nose" right now despite being dosed with Piriton and despite her own hay being soaked. Having seen the clouds of grass-pollen blowing off a neighbour's field last week I couldn't really blame her for doing a bit of nose blowing as we climbed.

We've been doing a lot more work this year since I ended full time employment, so as soon as I saw that the road markings had been ground off ready for a resurfacing I got Danny to come and shoe Ruby - there's a limit to the number of times I can wrestle with Easyboots in a week. And it did free up the boots to use on Sonny while he was here. Her shoes were gripping well. Down the tree-lined hedgerows on the far side she was happy to trot, although I walked her on the steepest bits because the fresh chippings of the surface would be vicious to stumble onto. By the time we got to Roundthwaite the rain had stopped and all the wet leaves were twinkling in sunshine.

I posted a couple of letters in the box at Roundthwaite; we do this on occasion, so Ruby is used to standing close to the wall while I push the letters through the slot. Then we went on towards the A685, the Appleby to Kendal road. Traffic here is less forgiving than on the back roads; the A685 is wider and has sweeping curves that invite fast driving. Ruby trotted over the motorway bridge and the railway bridge, and faced oncoming motorbikes, and put up with swishing tyres passing her, and I just let her swing along and talked to her, and she didn't flinch an inch. Here and there through narrower stretches we had cars queueing behind us, but then I held the middle of my carriageway and didn't give anyone chance to risk overtaking us on blind summits. And, I have to say, most drivers know when they should be patient - and it WAS Sunday! :)

We arrived safely in Tebay and delivered the mended pad to David, chatting while Ruby stood on the pavement and got her breath back from the long trot on the main road.

"Which way are you going back?"

"Well, the sun's coming out again, so I think I'll go through Orton."

So that's what we did. Five easier miles, compared to four with Pikey to tackle a second time. I walked Ruby on the quiet and wide stretches through Tebay, where cars could easily overtake, trotted her where the road was narrow, and round the motorway roundabout, and past the old fish farm and the grazing Shetland ponies, the bridge at Bybeck with the young Fell ponies who whinnied and trotted uncertainly towards us, the rushy field where I bought my Fell x Arab Kestrel as a foal. Here the road becomes a series of switchbacks, and it's a game of cat and mouse to make sure you aren't in a blind dip when traffic comes over the brow behind you. Ruby handled all this well. I pulled in on one of the lay-bys to give her another breather.

Through Orton the traffic was peaceful but large - many of our neighbours are completing their first cut of silage, and the roads are full of tractors with booming silage trailers going out to the fields, returning grinding and fully laden. Ruby merely tilted her head to look up at the height of them, and kept trotting. If there was room to pull into a gateway and let traffic by, she responded instantly to the lightest rein, and stood (eating the chest-high grass of course! could I begrudge it to her?) until I asked her move on again. By then we were getting back into our usual territory and her interest in the scenery was starting to fade; but the views back to the Howgills were sharp and clear against the stormy sky, and i was happy just rolling along at a good trot with the carriage balanced and barely swinging.

Down the hill into Greenholme, where we met a car and another tractor and trailer who waited for us to clear the hump-backed bridge over Birk Beck. I turned Ruby up the hill for home and she sprang it - and I burst out laughing and let her bowl on.

I think our nine mile drive probably scored at Sue 9, Ruby 1.