Читать книгу The Majesty of the Horse: An Illustrated History - Tamsin Pickeral - Страница 17

HEIGHT

Up to 14.2 h.h.

APPEARANCE

Very attractive, well-defined head with small ears and a large, kind eye. Neck is long, well set to the body, and a good shape, with a flowing mane and tail. Clean, sound limbs, a deep, wide chest, and a muscular, slightly sloping croup.

COLOR

Typically gray, dun, black, bay, or brown with very occasional instances of roan or chestnut.

APTITUDE

Riding, light draft, showing, jumping, competitive horse sports

TYPICAL OF NATIVE PONY BREEDS, Ireland’s Connemara is a true product of its environment, having developed and evolved through the centuries to be perfectly adapted to its tough habitat. Despite Ireland’s international reputation for being a producer of top horses, the Connemara is the only indigenous horse or pony breed to have originated there. The breed takes its name from the area of Connemara, which stretches along the western coastline of southern Ireland across the western part of County Galway and County Mayo. It is a place of striking rugged landscape, where ancient, mysterious Irish bog land meets rocky, barren mountain peaks bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, south, and north, and the Invermore River and Loch Oorid to the east. The coastline is stark and beautiful and without shelter, and inland the landscape is peppered with crumbling stone walls and rocky outcrops. It is here, where the wind blows and the rain strikes down, that the Connemara evolved—a pony of great endurance and hardiness.

The precise beginnings of the breed have been blurred through history, but fossil findings of domestic horse bones suggest that ponies with some similarities to the Icelandic and Shetland have existed in this area since around 2,000 B.C.E. In the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.E., marauding Celtic tribes arrived from the Alps, bringing horses of eastern influence with them. The Celts were renowned for their horsemanship, and horses were central to their daily lives, particularly for transportation and warmongering. They were also great traders and set up active trade links with Celtic tribes across Europe, particularly of Spanish and Gaulish origin, which would have seen further exchange of horses of Spanish and eastern influence. By the sixteenth century, the superlative Iberian horse, along with horses of Moroccan origin and from Arabia, and the North African Barb, would have been introduced to native stock in Connemara and contributed to the great quality and beauty that is still very much in evidence in the pony.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the quality and conformational integrity of the Connemara had started to deteriorate, possibly as a result of widespread poverty among the farming community at that time, and through unsupervised crossbreeding. Official attempts to improve the Connemara by introducing foreign blood, mostly in the form of Welsh stallions, initially met with little success, though eventually a more organized breeding regimen that considered the quality of the native mares as well as the import of new stallions was implemented. Three foundation stallions stand out for their quality and for perpetuating the basic, prized characteristics of the breed: Rebel, foaled in 1922; Golden Gleam, foaled in 1923; and the most charismatic and influential of the three, Cannon Ball, foaled in 1904. Cannon Ball was so highly regarded by the local population that on his death it is said there was a traditional Irish wake that lasted through the night. Later infusions of Arabian, Welsh, Irish Draft, and Thoroughbred were also introduced, and today the Connemara counts as one of the highest quality and most attractive of the native pony breeds.

These ponies are exceptional small athletes and excel at dressage and jumping as well as all ridden and driven activities. They are often used by small adults as well as children and have an alert though trainable temperament. Of particular note is the smoothness of the Connemara’s gait, which is long, low, and level, and could reflect an earlier influence of the now extinct Irish Hobby, a gaited horse that was very popular throughout Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.