Secrets and Saddlers

A good saddler, repairing stitching and straps, can tell what kind of a rider has been using the saddle.  I've just noticed that my stirrup leathers need re-setting due to worn out stitching at the buckles and, just for curiosity, held up the pair of leathers side by side ...

And noticed that the left one is about three quarters of an inch longer than the left.  Which means:

a) I obviously don't clean my tack very often or I'd have picked it up sooner

b) I should be changing the leathers left to right whenever I do clean them

c) I've been sitting slightly unevenly for about 4 months

Which might tell the saddler:

a) she's a lazy sod

b) she never notices anything

c) her horse is a saint

The scuffing at the pommel and on the fronts of the flaps and on the tip of the cantle (go google) tells us both that I've been a little cavalier (pardon the pun) about how I've set my saddle down - it's been allowed to rest on the ground against a tree.

The angled buckle marks on the stretching rawhide girthstraps announce that I've been using the same girth for a long time and the horse's weight hasn't changed much - although there are variations on that theme which might give away the fact that I deliberately move the buckles around the straps so as not to wear out any one set of holes.

The neat repairs to the seat and the flaps prove that I have visited the saddler before, to get things mended before they really went wrong.  The supple leather of the underneath proves that I  clean the saddle more often than the stirrups and keep it in a leather-friendly environment despite how I plonk it down before riding. The lighter-coloured areas of leather towards the back of the flaps mean that I've got short legs which spend more time in contact with leather than Hoss's sides.

We're lucky around here to have a lovely saddlery repair centre where they seem to be able to mend just about anything leather and what they can't mend they can replace.  They're known to some of their customers as The Leather Ladies, which sounds kind of kinky but their workshop is called, unassumingly, The Leather Workshop and since Liz and Linda are female I hope they don't mind the title.  When they mended worn out stitching on my 'half-chaps' recently, Liz handed them back to me and remarked succinctly: 'Keep your lower leg still.'  

So I know what she's going to say about my uneven stirrup leathers and I'm wondering whether I should take them in one at a time so that they can't be compared!

Summertime and the Cotton's High ...

Several loads of washing have been done in This Household since yesterday evening and there is now a glut of summer cotton-mix clothes hanging about waiting for an iron.

A what?

Quite. It's not going to happen. The tee-shirts and tops and jeans and jumpers are going to 'Air Dry' straight from the washing machine, over great heights such as the bannister and from the beams.  If the weather forecast people have got their isobars and pressures and things right, there will be a Barbeque Sunday tomorrow and because I believe them, I'm getting ready.

My alarm clock is set for five am.  I'll need to be up and out early to beat the horseflies onto the Moor.  I'd like to ride up and over Dunkery Beacon, down the other side and back along the Eastwater and Horner valleys, sploshing in the rivers and letting Hoss have a proper gallop along Luccombe Allers before anyone else is out and about.  I'll let you know if it really happens. It's quite possible I might just smack the alarm off at two seconds past five, go back to sleep and wake at nine to realise I've missed the best of the day and it's too hot to ride until the evening.

The horseflies have just kicked in for the summer: Five-Nil to me so far, but it's early days yet.  The ticks are becoming a problem too and everything that itches - no matter where - must be investigated in case one of them has buried its head and started to feed.  I nabbed out a couple on my inner arms earlier. I ought to be grateful that's the only place they were, 'cos I do hop off for nature's call sometimes, out on my wanderings with Hoss and there's nothing the ticks like better than a nice warm fold of skin where the sun don't shine ...

Lyme Disease, carried by infected ticks and passed on to humans, is fortunately not common but it can be a real threat. Any tick should be removed completely, head and mouthparts included, the area thoroughly cleaned and any subsequent redness or swelling around the bite-site taken seriously. I've come across several bad cases in my time on the Moor, one fatal and others leaving nasty legacies such as facial paralysis.  Usually, of course, if caught as soon as the infected tick is removed, a course of antibiotics is all that's needed.

The preferred meal of ticks in the larval and nymphal stages of life is mouse-blood.  They
share this pleasure with the HKCs (HunterKillerCats to anyone newly involved on Blog) who keep leaving me with mouse-heads and gizzards as little gifts.  Do they honestly think I intend to mount the heads as trophies round the walls?  Unfortunately, since the mice have come from The Moor and its environs, ticks also hitch a ride on said HKCs and are not averse to settling in for a Cat-Blood meal instead.  I have a neat set of Tick Removers handy.  There was a time, at the Old Luttrell Memorial Hospital (see BlogThoughts) when I kept a set handy in Casualty, too.  We used to get a lot of unsuspecting tourists in, having been walking on the Moor in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, with various collections of ticks on board.  I became very adept at allaying fears, cleansing limbs and other parts, removing ticks and giving out Bravery Certificates to victims of all ages.  I did it all free at the point of delivery - which is more than I can say for the vet, who cheerfully charged the tourists for removing ticks from their dogs.

The sun has come out at last and the wind has dropped.  I'm off out for a walk and you may as well go back to watching highlights from Wimbledon.

Return to Duck Patio

You may remember, those of you who read 'BlogThoughts' before its transformation into 'MoorBlogThoughts', the unsolved murder of the Aylesbury drake at the beginning of June.  The eggs in the duck house were removed, incubated, candled and found to contain embryos.  All bar two hatched a week or so ago and there are now seven gorgeous waddly yellow fluffettes wack-wacking round the Reverse-Colditzified Duck Nursery.  Six of these ducklings are female.  The seventh is male.  In "Draco" lie the hopes for the continuation of the Duck Line.

The Larch Descending

Woodlands and forestry estates must be managed - fact.  One expects to see logging work going on in the vast tracts of commercially grown forests of our country. That is, after all, why the trees were planted in those horrid serried ranks in the first place - to be grown and eventually harvested for their timber value.

It came as a shock to me however as I rode along the woodland tracks from Wootton Courtenay into the Holnicote Estate a few weeks back, to find that I suddenly no longer recognised where I was. The ancient oak, beech, holly and birch-filled woods give way to about 20 hectares of larch plantation just above Luccombe. Lovely quiet timberlands full of flora and fauna and wild things of all kinds - but it has all gone.

I'd heard the sound of the logging operation and thought little of it until I saw for myself the absolute devastation of the forest all across the hillside.  Great trees, forty years old, 50 metres tall, had been felled in their hundreds: no thinning out here, this was total wipe-out. The woodland tracks were now heathland rides, out in the open, exposed to bright sunlight and high wind and rainfall that used to be filtered by the branches of the larches.

I rode the tracks carefully, letting Hoss pick his way over stripped branches and matchwood chippings, hunting for landmarks, for turnings and undulations I used to know so well.  Here one would let Hoss gallop on, here one must slow down as the corner is too sharp, here one can leave the track to jump a fallen trunk.  The pine-forest scent of the resins and sap from so many felled trees was overpowering.

All the familiarity had been cut down or uprooted and dragged away to towering logstacks. The paths had been churned to black mud by the weight of the vast logging vehicles as they plundered through the plantation. It looked like irresponsible annihilation of an area of outstanding natural beauty. It looked like commercial vandalism.

It was, in fact, a desperate attempt to eradicate a dreadful tree disease - phytophthora ramorum - that has swept across the country allegedly from Cornwall, killing larches and devastating plantations in its own right.  It could be as destructive, unchecked, as the Dutch Elm Disease of the last century.

So, awful as it looks now, this ravaged, scarred landscape has been made so for a clear purpose. Only by destroying the infected trees might the disease possibly be contained and controlled. The National Trust apparently has plans: eventually to replant the area as mixed woodland or maybe to leave it all open to the elements and let heathland rule again.

Either way, all is not lost. Nature will help, of course, working her magic on the ruin of the plantation.  By next spring, all sorts of new growth will have pushed up through the blasted heath, beetles and bugs and birds will have made homes from the new flattened habitat. Life will go on - just a different life from the one before. And where there is life, there is hope.

Press Release

In 2001, Foot and Mouth struck. The management of the disease, run by MAFF, seemed ... extraordinary.  The horses were very grateful to have solid hooves as many of the cloven footed stock on the Devon side of the Moor ended up slaughtered and cremated on hideous pyres that could be seen burning from miles away. We couldn't ride except on the tarmac lanes and even then we had to scrub-disinfect on return to the farm where we lived at the time.

Unable to ride the Moor in case of spreading the virus by HoofPrint, I was getting a little stir crazy and a friend decided I needed a new project.  She chucked a couple of packets of seeds on my kitchen table one morning and said, "Get growing.  It'll give you a hobby until you can ride again."

I took her up on it, thoroughly.  By the time the panic was over I had about a thousand little plants growing and that summer the cottage garden was absolutely rainbowed with larkspur, sweet peas, antirrhynum, stock, zinnia, marigold, livingston daisy, helichrysum, geum ...  dozens and dozens of flowers of all varieties and scents and colours.  They were banked up in baskets and pots and disused lavatory pans, in wellington boots and dead wheelbarrows and in every spare inch of soil I could find.

Many of the flowers were harvested as bouquets for friends or cut and hung up to dry, but some of the more delicate ones found their way into a Press.  I packed layer after layer of drying-papers with larkspur and forget-me-not and pansies between, carefully adding a little of each variety, to preserve them for some vague future Other Hobby - card-making, perhaps.

I am not a creature of Edwardian disposition by nature and my elegant floral-engaging enthusiasm didn't survive that summer.  By the time I moved house a year or so later, all the beauty of the garden was largely due to the self-seeded offspring of my first crop, and the beauty of my interior decoration to the hardiness of the masses of dried flowers.  The Presses (one of them a copy of Gray's Anatomy, circa 1938) were moved into bookcases or trunks and completely forgotten.

Until last week.

I was coming back from a nerve-soothing walk after a particularly horrible day, finally relaxing enough to enjoy the late evening sunlight on my face.  I was eating wild strawberries from the hedges and admiring the very last of the Queen Anne's Lace when it occurred to me to pick a little of each of the flowers growing in the hedges. There was red campion, honeysuckle, foxglove, valerian and several tiny orchid-like purples and a host of others I can't name and by the time I got home I had a wonderful wildweed bouquet.

I remembered the flower press, thinking to preserve my gatherings.  I found it eventually and, filled with curiosity, unscrewed the wingnuts and released from a decade of squashed neglect my collection of now silk-sheen pressed flowers.  Page after page of tiny delicacies I lifted from their long incarceration. The colours had faded but everything was still exquisite and the shapes of the leaves and each petal delightful.  I spent an hour going through my lost treasures.

What does one do with such things?  I'm no artist, no card-maker, no craft-worker.

I carefully and lovingly packed them all away again, maybe for another ten years. There was no room in the main press for any additions.  I eyed up Gray's Anatomy and the Large Animal Veterinary textbooks, unopened in years and their pages full of more beautiful things than the dry words of wise men.  No room for more there, either.

So the little bouquet I'd picked in the lanes went into water instead and the scent of the honeysuckle filled my bedroom as I later drifted off to sleep.

That sleep was sweeter and its dreams more peaceful than any other I've had of late.

The healing powers of flowers, maybe?

Back in the Saddle

My Debut Account (Blog Thoughts From Abroad) has unfortunately lost its identity following a very unpleasant 'hacking' episode last week. I won't bore you with the details but if something calling itself 'Jack' ever presents on your doorstep whining about being left out in the cold, please present in return my compliments of the season and blast it to smithereens with your blunderbuss.

I continue Blogging with the attached  word 'Moor' instead of 'More' because it is entirely appropriate to do so and those of you who understand my occasional need to pun will forgive me.  The rest can go hang, and please use enough rope to take 'Jack' with you.

It is now 02.00 in the morning and I can't sleep. A waxing gibbous moon (full on the 15th) has just sailed slowly down through the silhouette of trees beyond the fields and the owls are calling.  It's a beautiful night and I want to be out there. I'll leave you now, to walk the tracks and the peace of the unsleeping Moor, where the word 'hacking' takes on a completely different meaning.