My ( NOT SO LITTLE ) pony pilgrimage
ACENTURY ago it would have been a common enough sight – a saddled pony patiently awaiting her mistress who has popped into a grocery store for provisions. Today, Diamond the 13-year-old cob is a conspicuous anomaly as she takes up position next to the car park and trolley bay a few feet from a Lanarkshire Co-op.
Not that the askance stares appear to bother her – still less so the little Jack Russell whose head is poking out of one of Diamond’s saddlebags. They are used to supermarket stops even if the shoppers brushing past cannot fathom what they are doing there.
Presently Mistress will return – possibly with treats – and they will be on their way again. It is a gorgeous morning, dry and clear, so the spray from passing trucks will not be a problem today. Who knows how many miles from here they will be by sundown or what their sleeping arrangements will look like tonight? They will just have to see how it goes. That is what Mistress always says and it seems to work out for her.
It is day eight of an extraordinary annual pilgrimage which baffles many but leaves practically all who take the time to learn its details both inspired and enriched. Every year come early autumn, Jane Dotchin from Hexham, Northumberland, migrates north on horseback with her dog Dinky in tow. There is no reason, really, other than the journey feels like a good thing.
Crossing the Border into Berwickshire, the three meander through Roxburghshire, Selkirkshire, Peeblesshire and into Lanarkshire where, in the market town of Biggar, they made their Co-op stop on Tuesday.
From there, sticking to the quiet roads, bridleways and cycle paths which Miss Dotchin has long since committed to memory, it is due north through Scotland’s former industrial belt towards Cumbernauld, a new town which, she admits, is not her favourite.
The litter around there is ‘shameful’, she says. ‘It’s appalling, in particular single-use barbecues which are left lying all over the place.’
Then it is on to Stirlingshire and Perthshire – and, somewhere in the Highlands, after many more days’ travel, lies her destination, though its exact location remains to be arranged. In time-honoured fashion, the three will just see how it goes.
The seven-week odyssey on roads less travelled would be a serious undertaking for anyone. But Miss Dotchin is soon to turn 81. She is partially sighted, having lost one eye and injured the other in a collision with a branch so map reading is out.
Each autumn she sets off on an epic 600-mile trek through Scotland. Not bad for a part-blind octogenarian, her ageing steed (and an arthritic Jack Russell tucked in a saddlebag)!
NOR is smartphoneassisted route planning her style. While she does have a mobile it is neither smart nor switched on most of the time. She uses it for the occasional outgoing call then switches it off to save the battery.
Dinky the dog does not have her troubles to seek either. She has splayed front paws, a deformity which means she can walk only very short distances. Hence her saddlebag berth some six feet up, from which she watches the world go by.
The Jack Russell, who is ten, is a veteran of these marathon outings, while Diamond, 13, is on her fourth. As for Miss Dotchin, she started them in 1971 – four ponies ago – though in the early years she headed off in the opposite direction.
‘I kept going down into the south of England because the bridleways were so much better but now the traffic is so bad down there that even if you’re on a bridleway you’ve got to cross the road and there’s so much traffic it’s difficult to cross.
‘So, I started coming north about 30 years ago, I think it will be now.’
Progress is steady and, if you know the pony-friendly roads as Miss Dotchin now does, not too bad for traffic until you reach Perth. There the options for avoiding those thundering contraptions which displaced her preferred mode of transport in the early part of the last century become more limited.
There is a cycle route at the side of the A9, says Miss Dotchin, but it is littered with discarded bottles, cans and pizza boxes which make progress hazardous – and that is before you factor in the trucks rolling by, feet away, making Diamond jittery.
‘I think the worst is the lack of consideration on the roads for horses,’ muses the rider. ‘It is appalling. Occasionally people slow down but on the whole they don’t.’
The encouraging news for Miss Dotchin is that, this year, more than any other, people are looking out for her. Indeed, as someone who started these autumn outings as a way to see friends, she is now finding them everywhere she goes.
It was a chance encounter in late September last year on Rannoch Moor with Rab Black from nearby Tyndrum which did the trick. Spying the intrepid trio making their way along a remote dirt track near his home, he chatted with Miss Dotchin and filmed their conversation.
Swiftly it became clear she had been on horseback – or on foot when Diamond’s back needed a rest – all the way from Northumberland.
Detailing her journey as if it were the most normal thing in the world, she says she is heading for Fort Augustus, Inverness-shire, and plans to wild camp that night next to an old ruin she remembers from previous journeys.
‘By the time I get home again it will be the end of October and the days
get rather short.’ The clip, which Mr Black posted online, has been watched more than 415,000 times.
This year, their progress can almost be tracked through the multitude of social media posts from astonished passers-by she encounters on the way.
Others have known Miss Dotchmince, in’s story for longer. These are friends accumulated over decades of journeys and dotted at intervals along her favoured routes to the Highlands. ‘If I’m ever in trouble I know people would be there not far away to help,’ she says.
Though she does try to call ahead, last year she arrived unannounced at the home of Anne Bannatyne, a farmer’s daughter from Carmichael, near Lanark, and was soon offered accommodation for the night. There she enjoyed a bath, dinner, bed and breakfast before heading on her way.
‘She has a big appetite,’ said Miss Bannatyne. ‘She had a big plate of tatties and cabbage, followed by a second plate… and then she had a big pile of fresh custard and fresh fruit. We had a catch-up and she spent the night tucked up in the log cabin.’
It was a step up from the lodgings Miss Bannatyne was able to offer the year before. On that occasion, all three bunked down in a sheep shed. Not that any of them seemed to mind. Many nights they sleep under the stars, a tiny tent the only source of shelter.
It was half a century ago as a 30year-old that riding school owner Miss Dotchin decided her pony was all the transport she needed for visiting a friend 300 miles away in Somerset. The return journey took several weeks but proved so invigorating she set off on a similar trip the following year.
By year four or five it was an annual tradition, an open-ended adventure in England’s shires, offering majestic scenery, chance encounters and rich experience in what we now know as carbon neutral living.
Alas, the tyranny of the motor vehicle and a roads network designed for its purposes rather than hers ultimately defeated her so, in the early 1990s, she started to look north. The challenges posed by the weather, the vertiginous terrain and the traffic have proved acute.
Miss Dotchin makes no bones about her dislike of downpours – ‘I refuse to go slogging through the pouring wet’ – and is no great fan of hills either which is why she chooses her routes ‘on the hoof’, so to speak.
‘There are a few different routes I can take depending on the weather,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to go over hilltops in foul weather, but I work it out on the way.’
It was the traffic, however, which nearly proved her nemesis.
Back in 2007, Miss Dotchin was thrown from the saddle of her then horse Quiny after it was hit by a car. The animal bolted along the A9 near North Kessock junction. Sam, her Jack Russell in those days, followed the horse along the carriageway as oncoming cars screeched to a halt.
Miss Dotchin escaped serious injury but had to spend three nights in hospital for treatment to a broken wrist which, it transpired, she had suffered earlier in her journey. When finally rounded up, her four-legged companions were taken to Munlochy Animal Aid.
The journey home that year was in a friend’s car with a horsebox in tow. ‘I just know I was trying to cross the A9 and I thought I was across,’ said Miss Dotchin at the time. ‘The next thing I knew I woke up in hospital.’
Not that Miss Dotchin was discouraged. Thousands of miles on horseback have been successfully negotiated since then, many of them on the verges of the A9.
THE hairy moments, however, are more than made up for by the many blissful ones – such as seeing stags rutting in the glen as Miss Dotchin tucks into the porridge, oatcakes and cheese which form her daily meals.
She prefers her porridge with milk but water will do. ‘You can always boil it from a stream.’
And, er, bathroom visits? ‘I dig a hole,’ she says, simply.
Some nights she phones ahead and bags a bed for the night with one of her growing support network of friends. ‘I don’t warn them too far in advance because if the weather changes or I stop early then they can be left wondering where I’ve got to.’
Other nights she pitches her tent while Diamond grazes contentedly on her long tether.
‘I struggle to get on her half the time but otherwise I manage fine,’ laughs Miss Dotchin.
And Dinky, the other member of the travelling triumvirate, she ‘manages fine’ too, enjoys a brisk scamper when the tracks are soft and grassy and is a willing hot water bottle in the tent.
And so, at a stately pace, the trio’s progress north continues. It is, perhaps, the gentlest of protests against the motor car, against forward planning and deadlines and itineraries of places to be and people to see. These three prefer to see how it goes.
If that makes their leader an eccentric, well, she is surely the most charming variety – the kind whose glorious example suggests it may be modern life, not they, which took the wrong turn somewhere along the road.