On The Cleveland Bay Breed

Viewers of my YouTube channel will know I have horses, we lunge, ride, trap & carriage drive and generally really enjoy them, keeping them and ourselves entertained.  They are pets and massive parts of our lives.

The eagle eyed of those viewers will have noticed over the last two years we have been training our Cleveland bay, he arrived from the breeders Mr & Mrs Orange at Kenley Cleveland Stud.  His name is Nova.... Or Kenley Supernova, and we had to join the Cleveland Bay Horse Society to own him.

He is that rich bay colour with the striking black socks on each leg and a strong black main and tail, the absolute standard for the Cleveland Bay Breed; accept no less!  He arrived with some of the biscuit fringe colours of a foul and he has been slightly behind on his teeth changing from baby to adult, but otherwise he is a big boy, today measuring at least 16hh3 (hh = hands).

 

Nova's character is a quirkly one, for the most part he is all over humans, he investigates you and things around him... Being very interested and unlike many horses he is mindful, he doesn't just blindly panic but instead thinks about the challenges he encounters.

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Again this is a trait of his breed, to be mindful, steady temptered and is one of the reasons they are so popular in the driving role today; notably for the Royal Family, if you see a bay coloured hosed with the black mane, tail & socks, pulling a carriage for the King, well it'll likely be a Cleveland Bay.

 

When we started training Nova it was literal baby steps, head collar training, leading him around the field, past various bric-a-brac:

 

Since that video was taken I have lost a bunch of weight.... Nova has not, he's grown and grown, his shoulders coming out and strengthening right now in October 2025.  You can see here is withers are just around my shoulder height, today they're up around my ear and he is just such a much bigger animal.

 

Once the head collar training was done we moved onto a bridle, at first with a plastic bit, but quickly he had an upgrade to steel, with a soft articulation in the middle:

 

All of this training was done in house by ourselves, we'd done much of this before with Gerty, but never with such a young horse, still growing, so it has been fascinating to see his mind growing with his skills and size.

 

The next step was to decide how to best approach him into driving.... And long reigns were the best way to move forward, with the help of a local trainer we began introducing him to new equipment:

 

 

Two sessions later and it was my turn to keep this practice up.... As you can see by the state of the grass this was in the burning hot summer of 2025.

So it was I found myself behind him rather than leading him...

 

Which is a very alien thing for a horse to experience commands from literally out of sight as you walk in their rear blind spot, however, the Cleveland Bat genes run strong in him and he was extremely comfortable with this extremely quickly as his quality shone.

 

Graduating to road practive soon after, and I took him out without our trainer just this very morning...

 

All of this is not just about owning a horse, nor just owning a Cleveland Bay, so many people claim their horse is a CB it's hard sometimes to bite ones tongue as a true CB is a very special animal, and you have to have the rare breeds passport, Cleveland Bay Horse Society member ship and all the bloodlines clearly defined to state your horse is a CB.

 

And the bloodlines are very important, Mr & Mrs Orange who bred Nova are massive figures in the breeding programmes, advocates for the breed and the CBHS.  Nova was gelded without saving any semen from him, sometimes I am sad about that, but we could simply not have had a stallion at our yard.

 

So instead of spreading his genes I write this post to spread the true word about the Cleveland Bay, our experience with Nova has been so rich and rewarding and we have decades to come with him.

 

He will drive out pulling a carriage and we hope to ride him too, weight loss programmes and will power willing!

 

He has been an absolute powerhouse of mental development, horse wise he is very clever.

 

And so I bring my post to a close with this post from Mrs Orange: