The Welsh Pony Part 1

The Welsh Pony.

by Olive Tilford Dargan.

INTRODUCTION

While living in Devon about a year ago, I first became acquainted with the Welsh pony and found great pleasure in riding and driving with my children through the charming lanes and by-ways of Southwestern England.

I was so fortunate as to have at that time an attractive little gray mare which was loaned to me by a friend who was spending the winter in France. This little mare, partly Welsh, was so cheerful and friendly, and seemed so much to enjoy our excursions into the country, that I felt sorry to leave her behind when I left Devon.

The following spring, at the London Horse Show, I saw some splendid specimens of thoroughbred Welsh mountain ponies ridden by children, and my wife and I were so attracted by them that we determined to get four or five and bring them to America. Later during the same season, at the Royal Agricultural Show, which is the best fair of its kind in the world, I saw many splendid ponies of the Welsh breed, and had an opportunity to find out more particularly about them.

A trip to Wales was then planned with a view of visiting the ponies on their native hills and arranging with some owners and breeders to help me select a small herd for shipment to Boston. On this trip I found the Welsh country so charming and the ponies so attractive and so different from any ponies I had known before, that I spent altogether several weeks in Wales and the border counties selecting a herd which finally amounted to about twenty-five of the best of the true mountain type that I could obtain.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MY LORD PEMBROKE Welsh Mountain Pony Stallion. Winner of First Prize at Brockton Fair, 1912, for best pony thirteen hands or under shown under saddle]

I have been pondering ever since, not only how I might improve and add to my own somewhat superficial knowledge of the remarkable qualities of the Welsh pony, but also how I might bring him to the favorable notice of my countrymen. In this endeavor I was fortunately able to enlist the interest of my cousin, Miss Whitney, whose friend, Mrs. Olive Tilford Dargan, was at that time journeying through England and Wales. Miss Whitney saw the opportunity that lay before me provided Mrs. Dargan could be won to a study of the pony problem, and promised to set herself at once to the attainment of this object--although she did say that such a call upon her friend was about as nearly related to that lady's real vocation as a yokel's whistle to Pan's pipes. I think, however, that the author of the following letters has shown a true idea of the dignity inherent in the mission to which she was summoned, and has indeed written up to it; responding to the request of her friend with a whole-souled heartiness which makes me her grateful beneficiary.

C. A. S.

December, 1912.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MORNING RIDE]

THE WELSH PONY--HIS PEDIGREE

LETTER NUMBER ONE

_London, England, July 15, 1911._

Dear A----:

Some months ago you asked me to tell you all that I knew or could discover about the Welsh pony. I will tell you if you will stand the listening. For since you bade me I have taken the subject to heart and can talk on it from dawn to dusk. We have travelled--pony and I--from Arabia to the Lybian sands and from Scandanavia to the midland seas; and on my recent journey through Wales--that land, as you know, of old adventure and anguish of endless battle--I kept but half an eye in pursuit of the vanishing skirts of Romance; the other eye and a half swept along the vista in search of the mountain lady who trips so handsomely on her four feet that Sir Phenacodus Primaevus, could he behold her from his fossil retreat, would acknowledge his success as an ancestor, whatever may have been his discouragements in prehistoric society.

At first, aware of my weakness for the equine, I was afraid that I had succ.u.mbed to my charmer with regrettable haste, but a.s.sociation only fixed my loyalty and sustained the credentials that he wears on every inch of him. Let me parenthesize here and have done with it, that if I use my genders in hopeless interchange, or am forced to the apologetic "it," you must extricate the s.e.x as best you can, and re-register your old vow to reform the English language. "She" will apply but ludicrously to the gallant entires that were asked to exhibit their best steps before me; and "he" does not come naturally to my pen if I have in mind some of the graceful mares whose acquaintance I made as they drew me through pa.s.s and over bryn, almost coquetting with the task laid upon them, yet modest withal, for the Welsh pony, be the p.r.o.noun what it may, never forgets manners.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IMPORTED WELSH STALLION RAINBOW Winner of many prizes in England and Wales. Under twelve hands]

Later, at the Olympia, during the International Horse Show, I spent a fatuously happy time in the stables. Many pony types were exhibited, and n.o.bly they represented their kind, but I found none so love-inspiring as the little conqueror from Cymric, "Shooting Star," owned by Sir Walter Gilbey. He is a dapple-gray, eleven hands high, of perfect shape and brim-full of spirit, not of the self-conscious kind, eager for gratuitous display, but unabashed, careful of the amenities, and avowing with all the grace in him that he will be your friend if you choose to be _his_. If he has one defect it is a parsimony of tail, though I heard none of his thousands of admirers make that criticism; and he carries it up and out in true Arabian style. In the arena, when all of the horses came in for the general parade--the big Clydesdales first, followed by representatives of nearly every breed in the world, the procession ending with a wee Shetland, whose mistress is the little Princess Juliana of Holland--it was Shooting Star that received the most impulsive greeting--an applause of love evoked by his irresistible dearness, billowing where he pa.s.sed until he completed the great circuit.

I had the a.s.surance of others who daily haunted the Show that this triumph was a feature of every general parade; and it was then that I began to ask a certain Why? Why is the Welsh pony gifted with a symmetry that subjugates at sight, while his congeners too often show an _ensemble_ whose mild ungainliness must be admitted by their best of friends? Why, with the hardihood of the half-wild forager, and unflagging endurance, does he display the grace and bearing that we a.s.sociate with carefully tended animals of pedigree? The Exmoor and Dartmoor types only in a moderate degree show signs of high descent, and the ponies of the Fells (though I mind me well of the lovable traits of some of my neighbors among them up in the shires of c.u.mberland and Westmoreland) are indubitably plebian, while the Welsh pony is a patrician on his wildest hill. Even those who hold a brief for other breeds confess his superiority in points that stamp him "of the blood." Parkinson proclaims him the perfect pony of the kingdom, and Lord Lucas, who for some years has been engaged in improving the New Forest pony, says, after an excursion in search of desirable strains to introduce into the Forest, that he found the best ponies in Wales; and he has confirmed his judgment by the purchase of "Daylight," a young Carmarthenshire pony of prepotent promise, for alliance with the Forest stock.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SEARCHLIGHT--PONY MARE]

The breeder of Daylight seems particularly able in adding "lights" to a constellation whose first impulse to shine came from Dyoll Starlight, a sire who cannot be accused of any desire to hide his light under a bushel. It gleams not merely from one hill, but a hundred, and the breeder so happy as to own a bit of this strain rarely fails to advertise his good fortune in the name he gives to his prize. The result is a confusion of Starlights, Greylights--even Skylights!--in repeated series distinguished as Starlight II, III, etc., until the dazzled investigator prays for an eclipse. I take it, however, as a hopeful sign that one of the latest comers to the circle is yclept Radium. But to know these ponies makes one lenient to the pride that clings to the family name. I send you a photograph of Searchlight, a daughter of Dyoll Starlight, and granddaughter of Merlyn Myddfai, who was sold into Australia. She is a sister to Daylight, bought by Lord Lucas, and also to Sunlight, a three-year old pony mare, undoubtedly with a scintillating future, who will be exhibited for the first time at Swansea during the National Pony Show, whither I intend to go just to have sight of some of the exquisite young things that are springing up all over Wales since the recent awakening of Taffy the Thrifty to the fact that the pony is one of the most profitable a.s.sets of his country. The photograph of Searchlight is somewhat unfair to her beauty. The slight turn of the head coa.r.s.ens the nose and widens the lower jaw with an unpatrician suggestion of which there is no hint when she is before you in vivid substance. Her brother, Greylight, poses more successfully, but I send you Searchlight also, partly because she is a lady, and of a more retired life, but mainly because she ill.u.s.trates, so far as may be in a photograph, that indefinable thing called "pony character," which you will find me dilating on later. Just now I want to get back to my Why.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FAMOUS WELSH STALLION GREYLIGHT]

What in the history of the Welsh pony will explain this union of hardy wilderness qualities with a form as perfect as that produced in Arabia after two thousand years of jealous breeding? I asked the question of dealers and breeders and oldest inhabitants. I went to the hills to ask it of the pony himself; and to the British Museum to ask it of relics and tomes; following my "Why" to Arabia, to Libya, and back to the "elephant bed" of the Brighton Pleistocene, where I stopped; for there, it seemed to me, the Welsh pony began, so far as research permits him to have a beginning. To follow him beyond neolithic man into the paleozoic ages, when he was merely an old father Hipparion puzzling as to whether he should remain in his bog and unenterprisingly evolve into a tapir, or go into deeper and wetter regions and be a spiritless rhino, or step bravely onto dry land, turn his five flabby toes into a fleet and solid hoof, and become the n.o.ble _equus caballus_,--to pursue him thus far would keep me wandering in a region of timorous conjecture where he was neither Welsh nor a pony. So I begin with the Brighton deposit, where was found the skeleton of a small horse supposed, without successful contradiction, to be an ancestor of a species which Professor James Cossar Ewart has named the Pony Celticus, and which once overspread Western Europe. The tribe was gradually driven to the wall, meaning in this case the sea, and their descendants, certainly considerably modified, are even now to be found in the outer Hebrides and the Faroes. They lingered long in North Wales, that little nest of undisturbed peaks, and it was with the descendants of this species that the Romans mated their military animals and produced the packhorse so necessary in rugged West Britain. This packhorse was not the heavy creature that his name suggests, but a sure-footed, light-bodied animal, capable, however burdened, of going nimbly up and down the hills. In East Britain and the midlands there was no incentive to breed him, as the numerous heavier types sprung from the Forest horse were more serviceable there. But in Wales at this time we have the first authentic infiltration of alien blood, and this blood was undoubtedly of the Orient. The Romans, we know, were patrons of the East in matters equestrian, and in their files of leadership there could have been

"no lack Of a proud rider on so proud a back"

as that of the Arabian courser. But of more importance than such occasionally distinguished pedigrees was the fact that their army horses in general were Gallic; and the Gallic horse was of Eastern origin. So the Romans left to Wales not only a heritage of legendary stone, such as the old camp, Y Caer Bannau, which is shown you in Breconshire, but a far more valued legacy which is yet animate in the veins of the Welsh pony. The invaders were busy in Wales for four hundred years, during which time the packhorse became a domestic type, and gradually the acclimated Arabian blood crept up the hills and among the wildest herds--a slow infusion that left the pony still a pony, retaining all the hardihood that made life possible on the scanty-herbaged peaks.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A FULL BROTHER OF DAYLIGHT Taken At Llandilo]

The ponies of the southern moors, no doubt, were also marked by this early cross; and they, too, still held at the time something of their heritage from the Pony Celticus; but their position had left them liable to mixture with the Forest Horse, or what represented him in the low-countries, and it was by just that mixture that the packhorse of Wess.e.x, which was the "gentleman's horse" in Devon down to two hundred years ago, became different from that of Wales. It is very unlikely that the Forest Horse was ever in the Cambrian hills, and the active little Pony Celticus on his remote slopes escaped any alliance with that phlegmatic blood. For this reason, in the Welsh descendants of the species, the Eastern horse found a comparatively unmixed strain which was probably as old as his own. The frequent absence of ergots and callossities (those vestigial signs, near knee and fetlock, of vanished digits) would indicate in the Pony Celticus a development as ancient at least as that of the Libyan ancestors of the Arabian horse. Professor Ridgeway, of Cambridge University, thinks that he may even be a related northern branch of the horse of Libya, and that both the North African species and the Pony Celticus may claim the bones of the small horse found in the Brighton Pleistocene as ancestral. If this be true, then when Roman met Welsh in equine society, the two oldest breeds of the world were united, and, as you know, the older the breed the more ineradicable are its characteristics. If originally congeneric, that too would be in favor of the type produced by such a union, and may be a key to the persistence and potency of the Welsh mountain stock. In the Pony Celticus, wherever his modified posterity is least changed, the dorsal and lateral marks indicating equatorial origin are reproduced with little difficulty.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LONGMYND FAVORITE AND HER FOAL MANOMET WHITE STAR The mare was imported in 1911 and shows her remarkable breeding in every way]

And we have another reason for suspecting the pony ancestor of our Welsh variety to be of North African kinship rather than allied to the Asiatic horse, with large ergots and heavy callossities, which came by the northern route into Scandinavia. This horse, by tradition and record, was of an intractable disposition. It was in upper Asia that the bit originated, while the Libyan horse was of so gentle a nature that his descendant is yet ridden on the Arabian plains with no more guidance than can be given by a simple noseband. Of this horse Mohammed could say, "G.o.d made him of a condensation of the southwest wind"; the consummate simile for fleetness and mildness. But I don't accuse the Asiatic horse of being the first sinner. Though the callossities are against his being as old as the Libyan, he may have originally possessed as gentle a temper, which became lost through a.s.sociation with brutal races (see Herodotus) who insisted on being masters instead of friends.

The horse resents mastery, as you know, and resentment is peculiarly poisonous to his character. Make him a comrade or nothing. His ascent may have been more dignified than our own, and in one way at least he prehistorically showed more gentle intentions; 'twas we who kept the claws! But while I leave the question of responsibility open in the case of the Asiatic horse, I am glad to think that our pony did not come by way of his blood, whether corrupted by man or tainted with original sin. Certain it is that the Pony Celticus possessed a docility and fair-mindedness that indicated a blameless descent, and there is no evidence that his Welsh offspring were ever handled by man in a way to warp his character. It is true that in his wild state, after the sheep-dog was introduced into Wales (which was comparatively late), the pony was much harried, and driven to the more barren regions; but whenever brought down to the farms he was at once admitted to family privileges that gave him confidence in humanity. As early as the days of the good king, Howell Dha, laws for his care and protection were recorded, and these seem to have been but a codification of rules that had long been in general practice. We read that if a man borrowed a horse and fretted the hair on his back he was to pay a fine to the owner; but such a law as we find among the ancient statutes of Ireland, "Quhasoever sall be tryet or fund to stow or cut ane uther man's hors tail sall be pwunschit as a thief," seems to have had no call for existence in Welshland.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MY LORD PEMBROKE WHEN THREE YEARS OLD Taken at Shrewsbury, England]

I have said that there was no danger of invasion by the larger British horse on the eastern side. His big feet would not have been at home on the rocky Welsh pa.s.ses. On the fen side of England the horses developed a softness of hoof and sponginess of bone whose gradual alteration in later days to a close, dense texture, was one of the difficulties that had to be overcome in the production of the English thoroughbred; but, fortunately, the mountain pony was never troubled by such an inheritance. On the channel side of Wales there was a smaller breed of attractive neighbors, and the question of invasion was different. Just a short s.p.a.ce across the water lay a nation of kindred Celts, and that they exchanged horses as well as wives with their Welsh cousins--not always by consent--literature gives us sufficient proof. And the horses of Ireland, happily bred on a soil of limestone formation, developed such compactness, strength, and fineness of bone, that when their hard, clean, flat legs brought them into Welsh camps and pastures they were always welcome to the unseen genius attendant on the mountain pony. The once noted Irish hobbie was often brought into Wales and left his mark there.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LONGMYND ECLIPSE ON A RAINY DAY Ridden by a young lady of eight]

The records left by the admirers of this animal are pleasant reading.

Says old Blundevill: "These are tender-mouthed, nimble, light, pleasant, apt to be taught, and for the most part they be amblers and therefore verie meete for the saddle and to travel by the way." And this desirable creature was produced by a union of the Spanish-Arabian horse with the Irish pony, the descendant of the yet prevailing Celticus; for the Irish isle, as the Welsh hills, was one of his last strongholds. But long before the introduction of Spanish stallions into Ireland, this pony had become modified by the Gallic breed--the same Eastern strain that the Romans brought into Wales. In the three horse skulls with finely preserved Arabian features, recently discovered in a peat-buried crannog, Professor Ridgeway finds proof that the Eastern horse was in Ireland possibly as early as the sixth century; and the description of the horses in the oldest Irish saga support the claim that the warhorse and charger of the Irishman in his epic days were of Eastern importation. Breton was an open way of the Gallic horse to Ireland, for there was much compliment, combat, and barter, between the Irish and Breton Celts. And the horse of Breton was particularly suitable for union with Irish stock, the Arabian in him being already modified by a hardy breed of the hills. Now let me get back to Wales, taking with me this augmentation of the Arabian strain, pony-diluted, through the Irish port--another infusion most happily chosen by the beneficence that seems to have guided the Welsh pony in his evolution.

Not too much of this visiting blood either; for there were always wild herds that kept much to themselves; "companys of beesties" content to come only occasionally to the valleys, when they would lure away some gallant or coquette of the lowlands, glad to sniff the air of a fuller freedom. It was the slowness of these infusions, filtering through centuries, and always the same inexpungeable strain, that has made the cross so lastingly successful.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A WELSH COB]

Now to rush down to the modern period. As population grew, the making of roads, reclamation of slopes, and increase in local valley traffic, made the larger horse more attractive to the eyes of the Welshman; and some praiseworthy types, notably the Cob, were produced by the introduction of well-bred English sires. But there were unwelcome by-products in the process, and the importations from the Shires were often ill-judged and indiscreet. The light, graceful-bodied carthorse, of miraculous endurance, the descendant of the early packhorse, and very different from the clumsy, sluggish carthorse of the Shires, has suffered deterioration in beauty, bone and spirit. As a sage of Radnorshire puts it, there is a touch too little of the Arab and a touch too much of Flanders. And as I cannot claim that all the good blood brought into Wales made its way to the pony on the hills, while all the bad blood staid below, I must admit that he _has_ been affected by these later introductions; but in far less degree, for time has not been left to have its final way, nor is the coa.r.s.er strain of Eastern potency. We must also remember that two centuries ago, when these adventures in breeding began, the English had commenced those prudent experiments with the Arab cross which has fixed the thoroughbred in his sovereign place. There had been occasional importations of the Arab ever since the Roman days, but the English horses were of such numerous and diffused types, and so unlike the Eastern horse in build and nature, that such spasmodic introductions had no permanent effect. The great improvement came with the determined enthusiasm and patience of the eighteenth century breeders; and it seems providential again that as the ways of breeding between England and Wales became promiscuously open, the Eastern blood was becoming prevalent in England.

From this source the Welsh breeders began renewing the beneficent strain in the slow, best manner. Merlin, a descendant of the Brierly Turk, after his brilliant years on the turf, was brought to Wales and turned out with the ponies on the Ruabon hills to become the founder of a famous and prolific line. Mr. Richard Crashaw secured for his county the Arab sire of Cymro Llwd; and in Merioneithshire, the half-Arab, Apricot, of multiple progeny, became an imperishable tradition. Seventy or eighty years ago, Mr. Morgan Williams put Arab sires with his droves on the hills behind Aberpergwm; and it was in this region that in recent years Moonlight was discovered, roving and unshod, by Mr. Meuric Lloyd, and this dam of certain Arabian descent gave Wales her Dyoll Starlight, to whose paternity I have referred.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARE AND FOAL At Llandilo]

Notwithstanding this reinforcement of his aristocracy, there were too many doors left carelessly open. The larger pony of the lower lands was becoming mixed with the Cardinganshire cob; and some owners were guilty of letting half-bred Shire colts have the run of the hills. In time the only safe place for the mountain pony would have been the topmost crests, but for an event of happy effect upon his destiny. This was the organization of the Welsh-Pony- and Cob-Society in the Royal Show Yard at Cardiff one springtime eleven years ago. Lord Tredegar was the first president, and after him the Earl of Powys. King George became a patron, and the society acquired an impetus that proved it had not been born too soon. Not only are all the Shires of Wales represented in its council, but also the border counties of Monmouth, Shropshire and Hereford. The formation of a Stud Book was the initial practical business of the Society, and its first volumes derive special value from the fact that Wales has always tended to the patriarchial system, and her traditions, whether of horses or families, can be relied upon.

There have always been wise and prudent breeders in the land; men who could, in some degree, counteract indifference and hold to ideal aim.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LONGMYND]

The Society went to its work with "ears laid back"; but I will mention only two of its achievements. One of these, which will affect the pony's future, so long as ponies be, was an Act of Parliament that enables breeders to clear the Commons of all stallions which a competent committee decides are undesirable. The Common Lands of Wales are so extensive, and comprise so many tracts, that improvement by selection other than nature's is a farce so long as the pasturage is free to any and all. Nature long ago accomplished her best for the Welsh pony, and while he was practically an isolated type it was easy to maintain her standard. But with multifarious breeds and half-breeds in proximity, the carelessness of man was beginning to undo her work, and Wales might have followed Ireland in the deterioration of her pony stock and the loss of a fixed type, if the Society had not actively intervened. The struggle over the Act was discouragingly prolonged, for Taffy is sometimes stubborn, and he could not see that the right to use the Commons would still be a right if it were limited by consideration for one's neighbors. His beast might be as poor a thing as he pleased--sickle-hocked, goose-rumped, tucked up in the brisket, as some of the larger valley-bred ponies were, and, alas, are--but if it could successfully beguile the feminine portion of his neighbor's carefully sorted drove, the helpless neighbor, injured in heart and pocket, had no redress. Finally, after many difficulties, unwearying effort, and a constant display of good nature, the committee secured the pa.s.sage of the Act and put an end to what one of the overworked members, exasperated to humor, termed the "unlimited liability sire system."

I have mentioned two sections where this system had been brought to a close some years before the pa.s.sage of the Act. One of these is the Longmynd Range, lying back of Church Stretton, in Shropshire. Though beyond the March, it is practically Welsh in all that concerns its pony interests. The Range covers about seventy square miles, and at the top is a plateau, two thousand feet high, which was a stronghold of the pony before England began to write her history. Deep gullies cut the slopes and widen into ravines, then into valleys. There are crags to climb, and boggy dongas to be avoided. The heather in places is girth-deep, and altogether it is a typical breeding spot of the wild mountain pony. Here we understand how he came by his agility and hardiness, and realize how persistent must be the qualities bred into him by centuries of such environment. In this region it has been the custom for the last twenty-five years to have an annual drive and round-up, when all the ponies are brought down, selected, sorted, the undesirables cast out, and the others, excepting those picked for market, or exchanged for ponies of another run, sent back to freedom.

The ponies are not eager to leave their heights, and they give the riders that bring them down an anxious as well as exhilarating time.

The "drives" take place in September, and I hope to be at the next one, but whether for the sake of poetry or ponies I don't yet know. I am beginning to believe that they are not unrelatable.