theoldbrownnag:

From my trip to Ireland:

As I was photographing the polo match, my husband tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention and said, “Hey! Look!“ 

I followed the direction of his pointing finger, and there, further up the hill from the polo field was this man on his Shire mare, looking as though he had walked straight out of a folktale.

Of course I had to go talk to this man. Yes, shy, introverted me.

So we walked up the hill and I asked the gentleman if I could take a photo of him with his horse. He kindly obliged, and then started to tell me about his mare. (The following is paraphrased, because even though I wrote our conversation down as soon as I could, memory is an imperfect thing.)

“She’s 18, and she came from a rescue in England. My brother had her, but she had two little broken bones in her leg and he didn’t want to give her the time to heal, y’know yerself… he wanted to put her to sleep. I told him, I did, ‘I’ve got the time for ‘er.’ and so I took her home. I worked with her, I did. She healed up in time and now she’s good as new. Her name’s Zaggy. My grandkids named her. If you look at the white mark on her face it zigs and it zags, so Zaggy, y’know.”

“I just be bringing her home from the riding school for disabled folk. They needed a big horse, y’know yerself. Some of them kids… Their parents don’t even know how big they are. They tell the lady ‘My son be 13 stone.’ and the instructor, she’ll get out the scale, and the lad’ll be 17 stone! Can’t put that heavy a lad on a small ‘orse! So Zaggy here, she helps those kids. But now the season’s over, and so I was just waiting for a dry day to ride ‘er home. I was riding ‘er when I ‘eard about this match and I thought I would come and see. Then I ‘eard there would be fireworks after and I thought t’ myself ‘That’s not an opportunity to waste!’ It’s good to get a horse used to all sorts of noises, y’know. So Zaggy an’ I will watch the fireworks, too.”

Husband-dude asked the gentleman what he thought of the polo match.

“I can’t say I fully understand what’s going on, but if Zaggy and I wanted to play they’d have to go a bit slower and that little white ball would need to be a lot bigger, y’know yerself!”

Leave it to me to find a Therapeutic Riding horse at a Polo match in Ireland.