Very pleased to say we are finally underway with the 2018 season and a much more positive month to report on!

I have just returned from the most fantastic event – The Horse and Hound Festival of Eventing 3-day event. We decided to aim Wallace at this, as we thought it would be a great experience for a young spooky horse! I was slightly worried when we didn’t have the prep runs due to weather/crutches but we had a solid run at The Millbry Hill Richmond Horse Trials finishing just outside the top 10 and then a fab run at Llanymynech finishing 8th with a 27.5 dressage!

We arrived on Friday afternoon after a six-hour journey down to Keysoe just in time for arena familiarisation. On Saturday he did a lovely test for 30.25 to be 5th after dressage just 1.25 penalties behind the leader. Wallace then gave me the most fantastic ride round a tough, long and technical XC just picking up 0.4 reverse time to move us up to 2nd! Clearly the XC didn’t tire Wallace out enough, as he was rather lively on the Sunday! Pretty much from when the bell rang until we went through the finish flags he treated the SJ course more like the Grand National and we sadly took two rails with us. Such a shame as this cost us the win and dropped us down to 9th, but I am so chuffed with how this young horse stepped up over the weekend and very excited for our future together.

We have a much quieter month ahead of us it gives us plenty time to have a play with bits, nosebands and martingales to try find the perfect combination to Show Jump him in. We head to Bramham next week to do the Working Hunter on the Thursday and then representing Pendle Forest and Craven Hunt at the Pony Club Show jumping on Saturday, all part of Wallace’s education to get used to a big atmosphere.

On a final note, it was lovely to have a yard visit this week from Poppy and Emma and I’m looking forward to going up to the Richmond store on Monday to stock up on feed. The question is… can we beat last times record of 9 bags of feed in a Ford Fiesta? I will try!

-Katy & Wallace

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