The horse track

The horse track has been a real success. It provides many benefits for the horses:Choice for the horses: The track gives the horses choice and a more interesting environment to live in, giving them access to their current grazing paddock and to the stables at all times. They have room to move round freely.The horses have settled into a routine where they like to come into the stables in the afternoons for a snooze, and at other times of the day will wander back to the yard, even when there is no hay or hard feed for them in summer.

The track to the yard is a good place to check on new arrivals as it is below the entrance gate

They also like to shelter under the hedges from wind and rain, the big blackthorn hedge down from the yard shelters them from the prevailing wind.Exercise: Having the track keeps the horses moving, they are evolved to move constantly in search of food and water and small paddocks don’t encourage movement. For Harley as an older horse, continual gentle movement helps to keep his joints moving.The horses can often be seen trotting or even cantering around the track, usually when Charm (the dominant horse) chases them. All good exercise, especially as the field and track are on a gentle slope.Water: We have two water troughs in the whole site, one on the yard and another on the track, which are both likely to be some way from their grazing paddock. This is ideal because it makes them move.Weight management: If a horse is putting on too much weight in summer, the track gives us the option of restricting access to fresh grass by shutting them on the track only in the day and l giving paddock access only at night. Generally the only option for restricting grazing in summer is shutting horses on a tiny starvation paddock, and then of course they can’t move to burn off calories and it is pretty boring for them.The downside: The downside of a track in winter is mud. In our heads we have a vision of a lovely grassy track, but after the wettest winter on record, even on our well drained soil, the high wear areas became very muddy. The ultimate solution is a surfaced track all round, but this is visually less appealing, and also takes away the benefit of short grass for the horses to pick at in summer. We had already used some of the dug out stone to surface some boggy and high use areas of the track, but this was not enough to solve the mud.

Pile of stone looking for a home, ideal for horse tracks

Stone surface on future horse track, it will be a high footfall section of track

As a result of clearing the topsoil off the yard and track areas, a lot of bits of stone were lying on the surface all over the field, so we began a project of ‘stone harvesting‘. Gathering up all the stones we could find and starting to make stone paths past the worst of the track mud.