Many of the common lands which were once open to the Welsh pony have been enclosed of recent years; but in spite of his exclusion from the better pastures and the warfare waged against him by shepherds and their dogs in the interests of grazing for sheep, he thrives marvellously. There are thousands of acres of wet and boggy lands whose grasses “rot” sheep, but which afford the hardy pony nourishing diet. In some districts he is kept on the move almost as unceasingly as are the deer in Scotland or on Exmoor; and the life he leads has done much to develope his instincts of self-preservation. Accustomed from earliest foalhood to the roughest ground, he is sure-footed as the goat, and neither punishment nor persuasion will induce him to venture upon unsafe bog. He has good shoulders, strong back, neat head and most enduring legs and feet; he is, in short, a strong, sound and useful animal. Some of the stoutest and best hunters bred on the borders of Wales trace their descent from the Welsh pony mare crossed with the thoroughbred sire; and the same may be said of some of the best modern steeplechasers.
J. C. Loudon, in his work, An Encyclopedia of Agriculture, published in 1825, writes:—
“The Welsh horse bears a near resemblance in point of size to the best native breed of the Highlands of Scotland. It is too small for the two-horse ploughs; one that I rode for many years, which, to the last, would have gone upon a pavement by choice, in preference to a softer road.”
Again, the celebrated sporting writer, “Nimrod” (C. J. Appleby), in his book The Horse and the Hound, published in 1842, writes of this breed as follows:—
“They are never lame in the feet, or become roarers; they are also very little susceptible of disease in comparison with other horses, and as a proof also of their powers of crossing a country, the fact may be stated of the late Sir Charles Turner riding a pony ten miles in forty-seven minutes, and taking thirty leaps in his course, for a wager of 1,000 guineas, with the late Duke of Queensberry.... The Earl of Oxford had a mare pony, got by the Clive Arabian, her dam by the same horse, out of a Welsh mare pony, which could beat any of his racers four miles at a feather-weight; and during the drawing of the Irish lottery the news was conveyed express from Holyhead to London chiefly by ponies, at the rate of nearly twenty miles an hour.”
Endeavours have been made from time to time to improve the breed, but these efforts have been made by individuals, and the benefits, when any followed, were local and temporary. The first recorded introduction of superior alien blood occurred in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, when that famous little horse, Merlin, was turned out to summer on the Welsh hills after his retirement from the Turf. The small horses which George II.’s Act (p. 8) sought to banish from the race-course were not all worthless; “vile and paltry” they may have been as a class, but there were some good ones among them, and Merlin was the best. This little horse, who owed his name to the smallest of British hawks, beat every animal that started against him, and enjoyed a career of uninterrupted success until he broke down; he was then purchased by a Welsh gentleman, said to have been an ancestor of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, and turned out to run with the droves on the hills. So remarkable was the improvement wrought upon the breed by this one stallion that in course of a few years the value of the ponies in that locality greatly increased. The name of the sire was applied to his stock and their descendants, which became famous as “Merlins”; and the certificate that proved an animal one of the true Merlin breed made all the difference in the market.
That usually accurate authority, Richard Berenger, in his History and Art of Horsemanship, says, the Welsh breed, “once so abundant, is now [1771] nearly extinct;” but in this he must have been mistaken, as there is evidence from the district to show that twenty-six years later it was very far from extinct. “A Farmer” writes to the Gentleman’s Magazine of July, 1797, complaining of the “injurious increase of the smallest breed of ponies, which are no kind of use,” and which, he says, do an immense amount of mischief to the growing corn. He ventured to assert that for one cow found trespassing ten ponies would be seen, and strongly urged that an Act of Parliament should be passed forbidding right of common to horses under 14 hands high.
In the middle of the present century, when fast-trotting animals for harness and saddle were in great demand, it was thought desirable to see what could be done with the Welsh pony, and accordingly Comet, Fire-away, Alonzo the Brave, and other fast-stepping small-sized Hackney sires were brought from Norfolk into Cardiganshire and Breconshire to cross with the native ponies. Such a cross could have hardly failed to result in a strong, fast-trotting and useful pony.
The Report issued by the recent Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire contains some remarks on the subject which must be reproduced here:—
“With regard to cobs and ponies, breeding in this direction is a much larger factor in the farming of Wales. There is plenty of material to make use of, and the breeding of ponies might be made much more profitable than it is at present. In the counties of Radnor and Brecon there has been some systematic attempts to encourage the breeding of cobs, with satisfactory results. On the mountains of North Wales, which were formerly famous for wild herds of ‘Merlins,’ little has, however, been done. Lord Penrhyn purchased an excellent stallion, Caradoc, who might have done much good had he been more patronised. The fault seems to lie in the careless treatment of the herds of ponies, which are allowed to ramble at will, winter and summer, to live or starve as nature may please. No attention whatever is paid to the breeding, the herds being wild to all intents and purposes. It seems a pity that such waste should be allowed. The stoutness and endurance of the Welsh pony is proverbial, and if attention were paid to selection in breeding, separation of the sexes, and feeding and shelter in the winter, an exceedingly valuable addition to the mountain farmer’s profits might be found at a small cost.