Fancy meeting you here: All the pretty horses

Sharing a hillside with some of the 300 ponies which roam free in the Carneddau mountains of Snowdonia is a magical experience.

ASHIELD-WALL OF RAIN moves across the hill with an unfaltering pace: not fast, not slow, just wet. The yellowing grasses and stillgreen rushes of the valley floor bend away from it, as the last minute rush of air that bad weather brings whispers threats to all living things. Clad in waterproofs, I crouch down, back to the wall, and await the inevitable soaking. Thirty feet away, a mare and foal, half hidden in the vegetation, instinctively turn their hind quarters towards the hill-blown rain and drop their heads. Then, we are nothing. That wall breaks over us with a soft, insistent weight. Everything – the mountains, ponies, even my own sense of self – is somehow lost. Welcome to the world of Snowdonia’s Carneddau ponies.

Ten minutes is not very long in mountain time and I’m not sure it means much to one of these ponies either. These ancient warriors can claim a lineage back to the Bronze Age and have been isolated from their close relatives, the Welsh mountain ponies, for several hundred years – long enough to be considered a breed in their own right. Early autumn has urged the Carneddau ponies’ coats to thicken and through binoculars I can see them beading water droplets in a mesmerisingly tactile way. Each sphere of moisture sparkles with an inverted reflection of the sky. A half-hearted flick of a tail sends a fine spray of raindrops finally to the ground. Everything is saturated, but in the dull, even light, saturated in colour too. The coats of the ponies echo their surroundings: all is subtle, everything blends in. It’s a timeless image.

I’ve long been fascinated by the native pony breeds you see in the uplands, encountering them many times over the years in Britain’s more remote regions. They’re not wild, nor even really feral, but more free-range. They all have owners and those owners pretty much know where they are, as they

graze these wild or common lands. The Carneddau ponies are rounded up once a year in November and given a health check, a quick trim of the tail to identify them as approved, and then set free in the hills for another year. About 300 of them roam an area that spans 77 square miles and rises to heights over 3000 feet.

It’s with this knowledge I set out into one of my favourite mountain ranges, with the hope of seeing some ponies and climbing a few hills and having myself a bit of an adventure. As with all expeditions, I don’t know if I’ll succeed but I have two plans: 1) search from the east and 2) search from the west. Binoculars help and from a strategic vantage point in the east I can scan miles of ground in minutes. I find some on my first look, a bit lower down in the hills than I’d hoped, but still exciting. I just have to get to them.

Walking is always a pleasure, but walking towards a herd of Carneddau ponies in the mountains feels different. It’s like I’ve tapped into part of our deeply-buried past, that of the Mesolithic horse hunter. Those last huntergatherers were some of the few to know the true herding habits of wild ponies in Britain. Of course, it wasn’t an island then, but an interconnected landmass with mainland Europe where animals and people could migrate at will. Over in the English Midlands, Creswell Crags is an upper Paleolithic site of human habitation, and in its museum is a section of rib from a wild horse. Found in one of the caves, it has the head of a horse scored on it in the fewest lines possible, capturing its mane flowing in the most skilful rendition of movement. When I round the spur of land that separates me from these Carneddau ponies, it’s this ancient art I’m reminded of. The similarities are undeniable.

Getting near these ponies requires an off-path approach to walking. They are instinctively herd animals and there are around eight in this group. In the true wild each herd would be lorded over by a stallion, and there would be a separate herd of bachelor males, all potential competitors come the breeding season (just like red deer). Here the number of stallions is kept low to control the population: the Carneddau mountains can only support so many before their presence tips from a benefit to the environment to a problem of overgrazing. During the annual roundup, some stallions are kept and sold on, many now grazing lowland nature reserves across the country. Reduced numbers can affect herd structure, but not behaviour. A dominant mare will take the top role, and a large herd will divide into smaller subgroups with overlapping territories. It’s probably one of these before me now, as half a mile away

I can see another similarly-sized group.

I approach them slowly and steadily. I keep my head bowed slightly, eyes looking at the ground. I’ve seen the film The Horse Whisperer at some stage in the past which clearly makes me an expert, and I know they feel less threatened if approached this way. Once among them I stay still, watching

“Walking is always a pleasure, but walking towards a herd of Carneddau ponies in the mountains – that feels different. It’s like I’ve past.” tapped into part of our deeply-buried

their ways. After my initial arrival they are very accepting, dropping their heads to carry on feeding which is a sure sign they don’t mind my presence. At one point I witness some head tossing and flaring manes; someone has stepped out of line. It seems to do the trick as the dispute doesn’t develop into biting or kicking. One behaviour I see repeatedly is mutual grooming. As well as practical benefits, it helps strengthen social bonds. Ponies make a variety of noises. They snort and squeal, whicker and whinny. The first two are signs of aggression, the latter two of connection, with a whicker a low-pitched call between mare and foal, and the louder, higher-pitched whinny for when a pony is separated from the herd.

The Carneddau pony is a very attractive, generally small-headed breed, and able to give warning of bad weather approaching – up to 24 hours ahead if a farmer is observant and has seen them leave the hilltops to shelter in the valleys. In summer, the ponies tend to be found in the higher slopes of the range, although during foaling seasons from May until late July they’ll come down off the tops to give birth in lower areas where bracken grows. Come early autumn they’ll have grown their thick winter coats, but it won’t be enough to let them stay in the high mountains during the very worst of the winter. 2013 was a terrible year, when a severely cold spring killed almost half the population. But they’ve since bounced back, with numbers slightly higher than before the natural cull.

What I really want to do is find some ponies up high in these mountains, and by high I’m thinking up at 3000 feet. From a recent backpacking trip I have a hunch where I might find them and next morning I return in bright sunshine, yesterday’s heavy showers an impossible memory. At a remote car park, I check the immediate hills with my binoculars. There’s a mare and its foal on a close

hillside, presumably a filly that decided to start her own group once she’d reached the age of four or five. It’ll be quite a while at this rate before there are many more of them. These two prove more cautious, not letting me closer than 200 feet, and in the early morning September light, they look as wild and untameable as any prehistoric pony.

They are a beautiful sight, but my nagging sense of adventure sends me up onto a ridge above and a big view of the high mountains. There they are, maybe 20 of them, on the saddle between Carnedd Llewelyn and Foel Grach. I have to go. I need to see whether these hardier souls behave any differently from the lower tribes.

This is the walk I had in mind: chilling with the ponies is my focus, but I also want to climb some mountains along the way. The Carnedd range seems huge from where I stand, the ponies just visible with the naked eye, and only identifiable with binoculars. The climb towards them, 60 minutes of calf-burning, sweat-soaked urgency, is hard. But I want to sit among these inhabitants of the mountains and know I’ve crossed their hills to be here. And that’s what happens. Once at the lip of the col, the clouds seem to mirror the ponies before me, strung out in the sky like a straggling herd.

The ponies advance in a slow steady wave of grazing, almost in perpetual motion. Just like the Moon never stops moving across the sky, these creatures know what has to be done and a strange man with a camera and notepad isn’t going to stop them. The wave keeps coming. I sit on my rucksack and they just keep munching, some only six feet away, gradually moving forwards. In my quest to get an interesting angle for a picture, I lie down in the grass. I knew instantly how the poor defenceless blades of grass feel, as the shaggy beasts tear them from the ground. From down

here, the ponies look more like horses. I look up from my clickings and realise every pony is staring at me; they’ve clearly never seen a human lie on the ground before. I swear a collective ‘What the hell is going on?’ telepathically broadcasts among them. The moment flickers away as the ponies know I am no threat. Lying down I’m relaxed, my breathing, thinking and movements all happening slowly and deliberately. The ponies can predict my actions and so I cease to be of interest.

I know these creatures aren’t truly wild, but they don’t know that, and having your presence accepted within nature is one of life’s summits for me. Up on the Carneddau plateau, the low sun backlighting those super-furry animals as they go about their business, only feet from me, makes me feel like I’ve climbed Everest. In the hours, days, and weeks that follow, I keep thinking about them, still out there, day and night, 24/7, come rain or shine, and I begin to realise the true meaning of the word hardy.

WALK HERE: Turn to Walk 22 in this issue for a step-by-step route in the Carneddau.

▼▲ UPLAND ARCHITECTS The ponies’ grazing and trampling keeps the gorse and bracken down and helps shape the mountain landscape, creating short-grass habitats ideal for rare birds like choughs.

▲ TAIL OFF During the round up in November a pony’s tail is trimmed to show its passed its annual health check.

▼ OLD TIMERS Ponies have been roaming Snowdonia’s Carneddau since the Bronze Age.

▼ EYE TO EYE Ponies have 350° vision, with small blind spots directly ahead and behind.

▲ KING OF THE HILL In 1509 Henry VIII ordered a cull of all ponies too small to carry a soldier in armour; this rugged terrain saved the Carneddau herds.

▲ ANIMAL MAGNETISM Humans and horses can form strong bonds: terminally ill patients in a hospital in France are comforted by visits from a horse called Dr Peyo. ▲ LONG IN THE TOOTH Ponies can grind away 2-3mm of tooth every year as they graze, so their teeth keep growing through most of their lives.

LIFE AND DEATH Survival is tough in the high mountains even for this hardy breed; ponies that die are sometimes left in the hills to provide food for foxes and raptors as part of the upland ecosystem. ▼ CAUTION Be very careful near wild ponies, for your safety and theirs; some are not used to people and can be unpredictable.