Scotland- Highland Pony Breed Video
Pony Trek at Blair Castle in Scotland on Highland Ponies in this Equitrekking video clip.
Video Transcript
DARLEY: (VO) We’re riding in Scotland’s Highlands, where purple heather forms a blanket beneath our horse’s hooves, giving the ground its beautiful color, but also covering the sometimes boggy footing below.
VICKI: This heather, it might look all the same, but there’s actually a few different types of heather here. In the olden days they used to use it to thatch the, their cottages or their crofts, and they’d also use it to stuff the mattresses as well, but I don’t think it would have been very comfortable to sleep in.
DARLEY: Yeah, it looks a little prickly.
VICKI: Yep. Laughs
DARLEY: There’s definitely a lot of it out here though.
VICKI: Yeah.
DARLEY: And this is terrain that the Highland ponies were bred to trudge through.
VICKI: Yeah, this is kind of second nature to them. They’re very, very, very good on this kind of ground. You should also never make a Highland go through some ground it doesn’t want to cause usually if it doesn’t want to go through soft ground, it doesn’t feel safe and it’s trying to tell you that it’s not safe. So you should never force them to go through ground that they don’t want to.
DARLEY: So I’ll listen to what my pony says on this one.
VICKI: Yep. Laughs
DARLEY: Laughs.
VICKI: Gosh, you can see for miles really. As far as you can see this all still the estate, even over the hills at the back there. And then we’ve got these old walls. These old walls, they’re um hundreds of years old.
DARLEY: I can’t imagine people trying to build these all the way up here.
VICKI: Yeah, I know. It’s crazy cause you get them going up big, steep hills all over the place. So, must have been some work for them.
DARLEY: Well maybe they had the Highland ponies helping them out.
VICKI: Yeah. Laughs.
DARLEY: Laughs. Just as they’ve helped us get up here. It’s so vast out here. I feel like we’ve traveled such a long way, but we could just keep going and going and going.
VICKI: Ah yeah. You could ride all day and probably not see half of the estate.
Darley Newman is the host of the Emmy Award-winning Public Television series Equitrekking®, which takes viewers on horseback riding vacations around the world. Equitrekking is broadcast on PBS stations and on international networks.
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