Cairnorchies is a horse-centric smallholding – a place where the layout and routines are arranged around my horses’ needs, rather than the horses fitting in around human wishes. It’s a 6-acre home to a mixed herd of 4 horses (see the Beasty Bio page for pix and a little bit about them all) and will gradually come to accommodate a few more critters of different species in due course.
The reason for me setting up Cairnorchies is to explore a different way of living with horses. I’ve had horses practically all my life – first ponies when I was a child, then I spent a few months working on a yard owned by a man who broke and showed Shires when I left school. I fell in love with heavy horses then and the following year I acquired Birtles Heritage Gwennie, a pure bred Suffolk Punch filly. She came to me at 18 months old and I worked with her, broke her to harness and to ride, and bred two super filly foals from her – first the pure Suffolk Penbryn Rhiannon and then Penbryn Lucky Dancer, who was half-Thoroughbred.
Disaster struck in 1993 when Gwen was 7, when she slipped (miscarried) twin colt foals and, three days later, died of an infection. I was utterly heartbroken to lose my soul-mate and work-partner so abruptly and unexpectedly, and it was even worse because I was in the process of moving from Wales to Scotland, had already just sold the then-3 year old Rhiannon and the 2 year old Lucky Dancer (as well as Frolics and Humphrey, a pair of miniature Shetland geldings) and was suddenly at the wrong end of the country, bereft of all equines.
To cut a long story short, early in 2018 I was surfing quietly around the web when I came across a photo on a advert for a young horse. I’d just come into some money and had thought it’d be nice to get a young horse, and there was a young Suffolk gelding with a familiar-looking face, Station House Sir George.
He did look very familiar, when I studied the photo. I read the advert and his mother was Ridgeway Florence.
Now, some years ago I stumbled across a photo of a Suffolk mare, Ridgeway Alice, who was so like Gwen that I got in touch with her owner and asked if Alice was related to Gwen. It turned out that she was – she was Rhiannon’s only purebred foal. Rhiannon by then would have been in her mid-twenties and had retired some years before, but Alice had just had a colt foal, Hector, and had had an older filly, Florence.
George was Gwen’s great-great-grandson.
There was a bit of toing and froing through the first half of 2018 with me first failing to buy George and buying a 4 year old Arab gelding instead, then buying George and keeping two horses in two different livery stables, then I managed to get them together and they got on well, so then I decided to combine my interest in clicker training (a horse-centric training system rather than a human-centric one) with the best approach to meeting George’s needs (Abe’s a well-behaved, well-brought up fella with no real issues, while George has a few Major Issues and can be the very large horse equivalent of a stroppy teenager) and started looking for a place where I could keep them on my terms rather than a livery owner’s terms, where they could have everything set up to keep them happy, interested and healthy, rather than compromising to suit anyone else’s ideas and timetables.
A horse-centric management system, in fact.
During the process of finding a place for the two geldings, I managed to acquire an older Arab mare, Poppy, and her young part-Arab foal, Parlakis Flower Dancer, so now I needed enough space for four horses! On the other hand, I have a mixed-age, mixed-gender little herd, so once they’re settled together they’ll be in a social group that mimics the wild horse herd their ancestors evolved to live in, which should meet all their social needs nicely.
I looked at various places but they were all two big, too expensive, too far away from where I live…. but then I saw Cairnorchies.
It was set up by the MOD in 1925 as a smallholding, one of a group in the area, presumably for ex-servicemen after WWI. There’s a rather run-down 3-bedroom bungalow (which is convenient, since the human part of the household consists of my elderly mother, me, and sometimes my daughter when she’s home from university), a block of sheds (including 4 stables) needing some work on roofs and paintwork, and 6 acres of grassland. It’s only 5 minutes door-to-door from my current home, so I can still keep an eye on my elderly mother without too much trouble, even if the weather socks in (as happens in Scotland every winter!)
Six acres is the magic number. There are various ways to work out how much land a horse needs – 1.5 acres each, or 2 acres each for the first 2 and 1 each after that are the most common rules of thumb I’ve come across, but they add up to the same number, either way.
Six acres!
By scraping up every penny my mother and I could drag out of our savings accounts, we could just afford the asking price and a few thousand more to get essential work paid for, so having done the maths half a dozen times over, I put in an offer. It was accepted.
So here we are! Just starting a long journey to get this place habitable, to make a home where all the horses will be happy together for the rest of their lives.
In order to keep things straight, here’s a couple of maps:
Welcome to the Cairnorchie Chronicles.
Cairnorchies Chronicles 