Until my epiphany at a bridge outside York this summer, I had horses all wrong. I’d run away with the idea, or rather cycled away, that they were just forerunners of bikes. I’d seen too many gushing 1880s odes to the new safety bicycle, framing it as an iron horse that needed no stable, no hay, no water; permanently saddled, ready to go.
So I thought of horses as animal cycles. Unreliable steering. Terrible brakes. Oversize frames. Only four gears, walk/trot/canter/gallop, with dodgy shifting. High maintenance. Emissions problem, too.
Then came my conversion on the road to Damascus. Or Strensall. Two nags were refusing to cross a narrow bridge, panicked by oncoming traffic. One of the riders asked me to befriend the horse, then walk across the bridge. So I…
