Riding Recollections, 5th ed.

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

In some counties, such as Roscommon and Connemara, the brood mare indeed, with the foal at her foot, runs wild over extensive districts, and, finding no gates against which to lean, leaps leisurely from pasture to pasture, pausing, perhaps, in her transit to crop the sweeter herbage from some bank on which she is perched. Where mamma goes her little one dutifully follows, imitating the maternal motions, and as a charming mother almost always has a charming daughter, so, from its earliest foalhood, the future hunter acquires an activity, courage, and sagacity that shall hereafter become the admiration of crowded hunting-fields in the land of the Saxon far, far away!

But whereas in many parts of Ireland improved agriculture denies space for the unrestrained vagaries of these early lessons, a judicious system is adopted that substitutes artificial education for that of nature. “It is wonderful we don’t get more falls,” said one of the boldest and best of lady riders, who during many seasons followed the pilotage of Jem Mason, and but for failing eye-sight, could sometimes have gone before him, “when we consider that we all ride half-broken horses,” and, no doubt, on our side of the Channel, the observation contained a great deal of truth. But in this respect our neighbours show more wisdom. They seldom bring a pupil into the hunting-field till the elementary discipline has been gone through that teaches him when he comes to his fence what to do with it. He may be three, he may be four. I have seen a sportsman in Kilkenny so unassumingly equipped that instead of boots he wore wisps of straw called, I believe, “sooghauns” go in front for a quarter of an hour on a two-year old! Whatever his age, the colt shows himself an experienced hunter when it is necessary to leap. Not yet mouthed, with unformed paces and wandering action, he may seem the merest baby on the road or across a field, but no veteran can be wiser or steadier when he comes within distance of it, or, as his owner would say, when he “challenges” his leap, and this enthusiast hardly over-states the truth in affirming that his pupil “would change on the edge of a razor, and never let ye know he was off the Queen’s high-road, God bless her, all the time!”

The Irishman, like the Arab, seems to possess a natural insight into the character of a horse; with many shortcomings as grooms, not the least of which are want of neatness in stable-management, and rooted dislike to hard work, except by fits and starts, they cherish extraordinary affection for their charges, and certainly in their dealings with them obviously prefer kindness to coercion. I do not think they always understand feeding judiciously, and many of them have much to learn about getting horses into condition; but they are unrivalled in teaching them to jump.

Though seldom practised, there is no better system in all undertakings than “to begin with the beginning,” and an Irish horse-breaker is so persuaded of this great elementary truth that he never asks the colt to attempt three feet till it has become thoroughly master of two. With a cavesson rein, a handful of oats, and a few yards of waste ground behind the potato-ground or the pig-styes, he will, by dint of skill and patience, turn the most blundering neophyte into an expert and stylish fencer in about six weeks. As he widens the ditch of his earthwork, he necessarily heightens its bank, which his simple tools, the spade and the pipe, soon raise to six or seven feet. When the young one has learned to surmount this temperately, but with courage, to change on the top, and deliver itself handsomely, with the requisite fling and freedom, on the far side, he considers it sufficiently advanced to take into the fields, where he leads it forthwith, leaving behind him the spade, but holding fast to the corn, the cavesson, and the pipe. Here he soon teaches his colt to wait, quietly grazing, or staring about, while he climbs the fence he intends it to jump, and almost before the long rein can be tightened it follows like a dog, to poke its nose in his hand for the few grains of oats it expects as a reward.

Some breakers drive their pupils from behind, with reins, pulling them up when they have accomplished the leap; but this is not so good a plan as necessitating the use of the whip, and having, moreover, a further disadvantage in accustoming the colt to stop dead short on landing, a habit productive hereafter of inconvenience to a loose rider taken unawares!

When he has taught his horse thus to walk over a country, for two or three miles on end, the breaker considers it, with reason, thoroughly trained for leaping, and has no hesitation however low its condition, in riding it out with the hounds. Who that has hunted in Ireland but can recall the interest, and indeed amusement, with which he has watched some mere baby, strangely tackled and uncouthly equipped, sailing along in the front rank, steered with consummate skill and temper by a venerable rider who looks sixty on horseback, and at least eighty on foot. The man’s dress is of the shabbiest and most incongruous, his boots are outrageous, his spurs ill put on, and his hat shows symptoms of ill-usage in warfare or the chase; but he sits in the saddle like a workman, and age has no more quenched the courage in his bright Irish eye, than it has soured the mirth of his temperament, or saddened the music of his brogue. You know instinctively that he must be a good fellow and a good sportsman; you cannot follow him for half a mile without being satisfied that he is a good rider, and you forget, in your admiration of his beast’s performance, your surprise at its obvious youth, its excessive leanness, and the unusual shabbiness of its accoutrements. Inspecting these more narrowly, if you can get near enough, you begin to grudge the sums you have paid Bartley, or Wilkinson and Kidd, for the neat turn-out you have been taught to consider indispensable to success. You see that a horse may cross a dangerous country speedily and in safety, though its saddle be pulpy and weather-stained, with unequal stirrup-leathers, and only one girth; though its bridle be a Pelham, with a noseband, and without a curb-chain, while one rein seems most untrustworthy, and the other, for want of a buckle, has its ends tied in a knot. And yet, wherever the hounds go, thither follow this strangely-equipped pair. They arrive at a seven-foot bank, defended by a wide and, more forbidding still, an enormously deep ditch on this side and with nothing apparently but blue sky on the other. While the man utters an exclamation that seems a threat, a war-cry, and a shout of triumph combined, the horse springs to the summit, perches like a bird, and disappears buoyantly into space as if furnished, indeed, with wings, that it need only spread to fly away. They come to a stone-gap, as it is termed; neither more nor less than a disused egress, made up with blocks of granite into a wall about five feet high, and the young one, getting close under it, clears the whole out of a trot, with the elasticity and the very action of a deer. Presently some frightful chasm has to be encountered, wide enough for a brook, deep enough for a ravine, boggy of approach, faced with stone, and offering about as awkward an appearance as ever defeated a good man on his best hunter and bade him go to look for a better place.

Our friend in the bad hat, who knows what he is about, rides at this “yawner” a turn slower than would most Englishmen, and with a lighter hand on his horse’s mouth, though his legs and knees are keeping the pupil well into its bridle, and, should the latter want to refuse, or “renage,” as they say in Ireland, a disgrace of which it has not the remotest idea, there is a slip of ground-ash in the man’s fingers ready to administer “a refresher” on its flank. “Did ye draw now?” asks an Irishman when his friend is describing how he accomplished some extraordinary feat in leaping, and the expression, derived from an obsolete custom of sticking the cutting-whip upright in the boot, so that it has come to mean punishment from that instrument, is nearly always answered—“I did not!” Light as a fairy, our young, but experienced hunter dances down to the gulf, and leaves it behind with scarce an effort, while an unwashed hand bestows its caress on the reeking neck that will hereafter thicken prodigiously in some Saxon stable on a proper allowance of corn. If you are riding an Irish horse, you cannot do better than imitate closely every motion of the pair in front. If not, you will be wise, I think, to turn round and go home.

Presently we will hope, for the sake of the neophyte, whose condition is by no means on a par with his natural powers, the hounds either kill their fox, or run him to ground, or lose, or otherwise account for him, thus affording a few minutes’ repose for breathing and conversation. “It’s an intrickate country,” observes some brother-sportsman with just such another mount to the veteran I have endeavoured to describe; “and will that be the colt by Chitchat out of Donovan’s mare? Does he ‘lep’ well now?” he adds with much interest. “The beautifullest ever ye see!” answers his friend, and nobody who has witnessed the young horse’s performances can dispute the justice of such a reply. It is not difficult to understand that hunters so educated and so ridden in a country where every leap requires power, courage, and the exercise of much sagacity, should find little difficulty in surmounting such obstacles as confront them on this side of the Channel. It is child’s play to fly a Leicestershire fence, even with an additional rail, for a horse that has been taught his business amongst the precipitous banks and fathomless ditches of Meath or Kildare. If the ground were always sound and the hills somewhat levelled, these Irish hunters would find little to stop them in Leicestershire from going as straight as their owners dared ride. Practice at walls renders them clever timber-jumpers, they have usually the spring and confidence that make nothing of a brook, and their careful habit of preparing for something treacherous on the landing side of every leap prevents their being taken unawares by the “oxers” and doubles that form such unwelcome exceptions to the usual run of impediments throughout the shires. There is something in the expression of their very ears while we put them at their fences, that seems to say, “It’s a good trick enough, and would take in most horses, but my mother taught me a thing or two in Connemara, and you don’t come over me!” Unfortunately the Shires, as they are called par excellence, the Vale of Aylesbury, a perfect wilderness of grass, and indeed all the best hunting districts, ride very deep nine seasons out of ten, so that the Irish horse, accustomed to a sound lime-stone soil and an unfurrowed surface in his own green island, being moreover usually much wanting in condition, feels the added labour, and difference of action required, severely enough. It is proverbial that a horse equal to fourteen stone in Ireland is only up to thirteen in Leicestershire, and English purchasers must calculate accordingly.

But if some prize-taker at the Dublin Horse Show, or other ornament of that land which her natives call the “first flower of the earth and first gem of the sea,” should disappoint you a little when you ride him in November from Ranksborough, the Coplow, Crick, Melton-Spinney, Christmas-Gorse, Great-Wood, or any other favourite covert in one of our many good hunting countries, do not therefore despond. If he fail in deep ground, or labour on ridge and furrow, remember he possesses this inestimable merit that he can go the shortest way! Because the fence in front is large, black, and forbidding, you need not therefore send him at it a turn faster than usual; he is accustomed to spring from his back, and cover large places out of a trot. If you ride your own line to hounds, it is no slight advantage thus to have the power of negotiating awkward corners, without being “committed to them” fifty yards off, unable to pull up should they prove impracticable; and the faculty of “jumping at short notice,” on this consideration alone, I conceive to be one of the choicest qualities a hunter can possess. Also, even in the most favoured and flying of the “grass countries,” many fences require unusual steadiness and circumspection. If they are to be done at all, they can only be accomplished by creeping, sometimes even climbing to the wished-for side. The front rank itself will probably shirk these unaccustomed obstacles with cordial unanimity, leaving them to be triumphantly disposed of by your new purchase from Kildare. He pokes out his nose, as if to inspect the depth of a possible interment, and it is wise to let him manage it all his own way. You give him his head, and the slightest possible kick in the ribs. With a cringe of his powerful back and quarters, a vigorous lift that seems to reach two-thirds of the required distance, a second spring, apparently taken from a twig weak enough to bend under a bird, that covers the remainder, a scramble for foothold, a half stride and a snort of satisfaction, the whole is disposed of, and you are alone with the hounds.

Though, under such circumstances, these seem pretty sure to run to ground or otherwise disappoint you within half-a-mile, none the less credit is due to your horse’s capabilities, and you vow next season to have nothing but Irish nags in your stable, resolving for the future to ride straighter than you have ever done before.