Hunter of a lifetime
Wednesday, a hardy “comical character” who did 12 seasons as a hunt horse in Ireland
“THERE’S an Irish expression – ‘he’d eat stones’,” says South Wold master and huntsman Mark Ollard. “It means he’d eat anything, and probably the reason that Wednesday has lasted so long as a hunt horse is that he has always been such a good-doer and therefore recovered well from hunting.”
When Mark was hunting the Scarteen, he remembers all his other horses being off games and Wednesday doing 18 full days on the trot.
“He was on eight scoops of oats a day and never left a scrap of it,” he says.
Wednesday, now 17, was bred by Kate Jarvey, an embryo transfer by Carrabawn View out of a thoroughbred mare called Lingwood Pride. In 2008, when Mark was whipping-in to Chris Ryan at the Scarteen, he was sent to pick up a four-year-old from Kate’s stud in the Limerick Wednesday country – hence the name – which hadn’t quite come up to scratch in his grading for an eventing career.
“He’d just been backed, and when I got back to Scarteen I took him out in the fields on a lunge-line. I couldn’t get him anywhere near a bank [the obstacles with ditches either side that are the primary fielddividers in the south-west of Ireland] like that, so I tacked him up, and he schooled away over them as though he’d been doing it all his life,” Mark recalls.
Mark fell in love with him and bought him for €3,000.
Mark Cleary and Mike Ryan both hunted Wednesday for a few half-days, and Mark Ollard whipped-in off him towards the end of that season.
“On one of my last days before I left Scarteen to hunt the Island in Wexford, he struck into himself jumping a bank and nearly sliced his leg off,” says Mark. “I cried like a baby.”
Wednesday has met with near-disaster a couple of times.
“The floor fell out of the lorry and there he was standing balanced on two cross-beams,” winces Mark. “And he always used to lean on the farrier when he was being shod, and once fell over and landed on the farrier’s tool box - a rasp went straight up between two ribs.”
Mark has great affection for the “comical character”, who will uproot electric fence posts when bored and jump a gate to which he is tied if he feels like it.
Mark remembers one particularly good day with the
Scarteen: “In the afternoon we were crossing country we had already done in the morning, and didn’t realise the fencing boys had already refenced it behind us. I piled on into a big bank, too late to see the two strands of barbed wire on top of it – and the single strand of high-tensile wire on the other side of the ditch on landing. Wednesday jumped up on to the bank, took off and cleared the rest of it in one go.
“Our natures just suited each other from the start. Is he supertalented? Yes, over banks, but he always just did enough over fly fences. He looked after me, without question. We looked after each other, to be honest.”
Now he’s moved to England, Wednesday has taken a little more of a back seat and is used to lead Mark and his wife Clare’s daughter Scarlett out hunting.
“But he’s always my back-up horse, and the horse I’d do the first bit of hound exercise on because he’d never stand on a hound,” says Mark. “None of my other horses have lasted as long as he has. He truly is my horse of a lifetime.”
“He looked after me, without question. We looked after each other, to be honest”