The 1am Cavalry

I'm having a hard time sleeping tonight, we ate late... And it's lucky I'm disturbed, as in a hazy half sleep laying here I could swear I heard horses hooves, then I definitely heard horse shoes on iron (once you've heard that sound you'd never forget it)... And then I heard something (or somethings large) on our gravel...

Oh yes, turned out to be something like 8 or the horses from our friend Julies at the top of the hill.

Strangely one of the horses in this pack I'd actually owned, Ted.  So he knew me and calmed right down, but it appeared the rest of them were not happy at being loose.  So, using Ted as a guide pony I let them lead off back up the hill... They had a few pit stops on the way, notably one of the gardens now totally lacks all the roses it had earlier in the evening.

But disaster did nearly strike as instead of finding the gate open for them to return through there was a closed locked gate, how the heck had they gotten out?  And more to the point how was I going to get them back in.

Luckily the wife arrived with a torch and kept them in a building site area at the top, not the best place but no-one, literally NO ONE else came to help, despite our seeing lights springing on, no-one came out to help, they just stared slacked jawed.

So with the wife holding them in a little, I went to get Julie up, she only lived a few doors down... She was mightily surprised and soon reinforcements to our make shift corralling arrived.

After they were back roughly in a safer place we paced back, they'd gotten out of their paddocks through two gates, two gates opened and left open by pedestrians....

DO PEDESTRIANS NOT KNOW HOW DANGEROUS IT IS TO LEAVE A COUNTRY GATE OPEN?

Eight, if not more beautiful horses could have been killed or worse passers by trampled or car drivers insured or themselves killed by stampeding panicked horses all through your taking a short cut rather than going through the allotted human sized, self closing, appointed foot path gate... Just because the large animal gate is 30 feet closer to where you want to be use the stiles, use the county council fitted weighted gates DO NOT open animal gates!

So, here I now am 2am and wired... I've been on a post-midnight mission...

I hope all the horses are back, and I hope they've not got cuts or grazes after going through the brambles and detritus in the builders yard.  I hope the lazy builder puts the wall he's taken down back.

And I hope at least on lazy pedestrian reads this and stops taking short cuts.