All in a day’s work Harness maker Kate Hetherington
Keeping an endangered craft alive and helping working horses overseas is all in a day’s work for Kate Hetherington
My “day job” is making carriage driving harnesses —
everything from pony harnesses to coaching and farm harnesses. All of them are made to measure for individual horses. On top of that, I’m a member of World Horse Welfare’s international training team. We visit communities in developing countries with working horses, design a horsefriendly harness that can be made from local materials and then train local people to make them.
I always wanted to do something that involved horses.
My parents said I needed a job that I could carry on doing right into old age, so for me this was it. I started my apprenticeship with collar and harness maker John McDonald at 16, but it was a long time before I was fast enough to make any money. You have to really want to do this job.
I’m one of only four practising collar makers in the UK
according to the Radcliffe Red List of Endangered Crafts. The methods I use haven’t changed
in hundreds of years — there are tools in our workshop that date back to the 1800s. The collars are made quite crudely. Basically, you just put straw in and bash it with a mallet! The harnesses are all hand-stitched and our sewing machine is still pedal-powered. It takes around 150 hours to create a single show harness set
and the collar is a couple of days’ work. It’s a real commitment, because you can’t just stop halfway through and come back to it. Once you’ve started putting the body on the collar, you need to get all the way to the top before you can go home for the night.
I’ve been working with World Horse Welfare for nearly a decade.
During that time, I’ve been to Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua. I used to go away for two weeks at a time, every couple of months, but now students we’ve trained are continuing with the teaching, so my role is really about making sure everything’s running well. It can be hard to see the condition of the horses.
They are often terribly thin and some of the harness is horrific — just a wooden A-shaped frame that comes off the shafts of a two-wheeled cart, for example. You’ll lift a harness off a horse and his back underneath will be raw. The thing is, though, that the owners often aren’t in a much better state themselves. They aren’t cruel people; they just don’t have an alternative. Mostly they’re really interested in what we’re saying and want to make conditions better for their horses.
You have to use whatever you can get your hands on locally.
In Honduras, we designed a harness that was largely made out of a flat-run fire hose. The material needs to be affordable because the owners don’t have money to buy an expensive harness. Some collars, for instance, we’ve made out of coffee sacks and a locally grown crop similar to straw.
I’ll always remember the first set of harnesses we made in Honduras.
We put it on the horse and told the driver to go off slowly. Of course, he shot off up the road at a million miles an hour and came back grinning like a cat with all our students in the back. They were all amazed at how much difference it made — how well the horse was moving and how much smoother the ride in the cart was.
‘He shot off up the road at a million miles an hour and came back grinning like a cat with all our students
in the back’
You know what makes it all worthwhile?
Coming back to a community after a few months to see the horses’ injuries depleting and people taking pride in their horses. It makes you feel that you’re really making a difference.