Horses have schlepped, hauled and galloped grooves into Britain, providing the muscle for transport, industry, agriculture and leisure and the inspiration for myth, art and literature. In The Bridleway, the environmentalist Tiffany Francis-Baker maps this busy-storied topography from the Uffington White Horse to ancient roads, canals, coaching inns, race courses, conservation projects and public art. She crosses the country to speak to horse-people and explores old bridleways. Some of the landscapes she visits are subsiding, as she puts it, ‘into the healing bosom of the earth’. Others are threatened with erasure, and so, ‘to keep these spaces full of memory, all we must do is tread the same paths, either on foot or by hoof’.
The charm of her book lies in wayside details. We hear of the Nuckelavee, an Orkney monster that’s part-horse, part-sea creature, and of the 17th-century traveller Celia Fiennes agreeing with her horse that they needn’t visit a foul-smelling spring in Harrogate. Francis-Baker visits a restored cider mill powered by a cob and talks to the photographer Ruth Chamberlain about the ways in which different landscapes have shaped native breeds, from ‘good-doing’ Highland ponies that thrive on little grass to well-thatched Fell ponies keeping warm in Lakeland rain. There’s a lot to take in, and we move at a spanking trot back and forth through the centuries.
But the idiosyncratic bridlepath can be confusing to follow, looping in on itself or stopping abruptly just as the way ahead gets challenging. The author, contemplating the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum, says they were part of a temple honouring Athena. Next we’re in Athens, and she tells us again that the Marbles’ original home was ‘built as a temple to Athena’.
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