Horses!

Living in the Louisville KY area during the first week of May is an interesting experience. The first week of May is like Holy Week here, and the first Saturday of May is definitely a sacred day.  It is, of course, Derby Day and the whole area goes mad about horses! Even me.

I was not a horse lover as a girl. My sister rode the neighbor’s horse and has had a lifelong acquaintance with equine animals, but I was always afraid of them. They are so big, and so close in intelligence to Homo Sapiens. Maybe even more intelligent than some!

When Paulos first meets Aethelreda she and her guards are riding horses. They would have been mounted on one of the several breeds that were native to the British Isles, most likely what we call today New Forest ponies, since they are the breed that lives closest to southeast Kent where "Bound by an Oath" is set.

It is stunning to me that the ponies and horses that can be found in Britain today are descendants of the ancient Celtic horses of Northern Europe. Of course, I keep forgetting that Britain has not always been an island. All sorts of animals migrated across the Dogger Banks when that marshy land formed a connection from Europe to Britain. There are currently eight breeds of native horses in England: Dales, Fell, Dartmoor, Exmoor, New Forest, Hackney, Suffolk Punch and Cleveland Bay. (Source Ponymag,com) And there are others in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The ponies of New Forest, Hampshire, can still be found there, roaming freely.

Queen Elizabeth II was a great lover of horses. She visited a thoroughbred farm in Versailles, near Lexington, KY, several times and was at the Kentucky Derby in 2007.  In the UK the late Queen was a renowned breeder of thoroughbreds, but she and Prince Philip also headed conservation efforts and bred several kinds of native horses. The late Queen’s last official portrait, made in the last year of her life, shows her posing with two of her Fell ponies. The last horse she rode regularly was Emma, a Fell pony. The Queen rode her until she was the grand old age of 96. Twenty-five-year-old Emma (quite close to the Queen’s age in “horse years”) made an appearance at the Queen’s funeral, in full tack. Standing at Windsor castle with the late Queen’s head groom, she saluted her owner and friend for the last time.

It has been very wet here in Louisville and the racetrack was a muddy bog for the big race. Oaks Day, which is the day before the Derby, when the race is restricted to three-year-old fillies, went off just fine. No horses were injured. The Derby was the usual two minutes of high-pitched emotions. There were horses of numerous colors at the start, but by the finishing post they were all mud brown! Thankfully no horses were injured in that race either. These days the safety of the horses concerns me more than who wins the race.