Leader of the pack

Fancy exploring the hidden hills of the Lake District while also helping save the endangered fell pony population? Then get your walking boots on...

- SUE WATT

It was a glorious autumnal day in the northern Lake District, the trees just turning gold and rustling softly in the breeze under a cloudless sky. Yet for all its bucolic beauty, I felt apprehensive walking through the fluffy cotton grasses on Rosgill Moor, with Fairmile by my side and some words of caution ringing in my ears.

“You have to let these ponies know who’s boss,” our trek leader Tom Lloyd had explained earlier. “They pick up everything about you, so even if you’re feeling uncomfortable, pretend you’re not.”

A jet-black fell pony with a mane like dreadlocks and strangely hairy ears, Fairmile looked wild and unkempt. But she was wise, the herd matriarch at 23 years old, and I felt like an anxious teenager on a first date, worried she’d immediately spot my novice nerves.

I was about to spend three days walking and wild camping with Tom and his rare fell ponies. We wouldn’t be riding the ponies, we’d be leading them, looking after them and getting to know them while they carried our kit. But having had little to do with horses since I was a teenager, the (many) years in between had sapped my confidence. It hadn’t helped when a friend who owned fell ponies described them as “cheeky characters, clever and quite naughty. They’ll run rings around you if you let them.” As we set out into Cumbria’s Swindale Valley, I was already envisaging Fairmile running copious laps around me.

Hades’ horses