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:

 

 

A Thought On Poles & Swingletrees

I was intrigued recently by a video from LindyBeige about Roman War Waggons, during which he brought up that some folks argue about how a horse might have been tacked to a wagon in that era.

Where by some etchings show only a single "pole" attaching a wagon to oxen or horses.

I looked at the image and wondered perhaps if it was a full length trace, which would be on the wagon frame, but he was totally right about the perspective and the image clearly being fanciful.

I today therefore was having a think about whether swingletrees would have been in use, they certainly are in ploughs and oxen drawn materials from the medieval period; I've read and seen etchings which come from contemporary sources.

My driving position has a single articulated pole, but this is not for the driving power, that is just for direction; and the swingletrees, to the horse traces, they are the power.... so there's a very intricate interplay between all of them to keep things in balance....

And to be honest.... I reckon in some form, this would have existed just a few years after starting to use horses, let alone a few dozen millennia as the turn to the common era would have been (year 0 by the Gregorian Calendar).

 

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.

Coming up later in 2016

To the many many people who stop by everyday, welcome and thank you!

To those of you who might hang around and revisit these pages I'd like to just go over a few items I'm looking at performing over the next few weeks.

Firstly, I have a big technical post about setting up Trac with Subversion, including securing it, hosting it on a virtual server and really getting you up and running with project tracking and management with Trac, from total scratch.

Secondly, I have a big of Dungeons and Dragons stuff to cover, both a bit about the official rules and the in-house rules we play with, and there will hopefully be a live stream with my niece whom is D&D crazy, and even made me a D&D based birthday card, which we will play through together.

Third, electronics, I'm probably not going to get to do the PS/2 connector project previously listed, but as the autumn winds in and and the winter comes across, I hope to get back to the DCC layout stuff, not least because I have a tonne of stuff laying around for it and two part soldered projects ready to go.

Fourth, a bit of computer history, I have a manual (just a manual) for a VAX VMS, I'd like to do some coverage of that for you all to geek out over.

Fifth and perhaps finally, gaming, I'm going to be looking back at Elite Dangerous I think, with the release and massive price tag on "No Mans Sky", I'm going to go back and see if Elite has done anything more interesting.  I've also been looking at buying Squad, the successor to "project reality" and going into that.  Our good friend Chaplain has invited us to play some Arma 3 time with him, and I'm playing World of Warships still.  So we'll go through all of that.

Sixth, so yes, fifth was not final, programming.  I'm looking at a project internal to myself, something I want to actually create, manage & sell.  So we'll see how that goes, but understandably there's not a lot I can share.  You will also find me touting myself for business at www.freelancer.co.uk, and as such I hope to make up some of the wads of cash we've been spending since the wife's surgery.

I'll speak to you all soon, I may start to make a mid-month post like this for you all to catch up on, but we'll see how things pan out.

In the mean time, the pony has a new home, and she has a new friend meet our Gerty and Magic once again: