The Hoof Fairy, UK

taste of riding..falling..doing superman impressions out of the front, side and back door!! From those wobbly first trots I was hooked. Then came the first real love of my life. As a reward for a morning mucking out "Diddy Town" I was aloud to adopt the most wonderful elderly gent.....Arrow.... a 14.2hh Dartmoor Pony who spent his life stabled due to chronic laminitis. But as far as I was concerned he was "The Best". Arrow and I were best mates for a short 2 years before he sadly lost his fight against laminitis but not before he introduced me to farriery. I was 10, now at nearly 30 I still think of him nearly every day and how he led me to want to learn all I could about how to give horses like him the longest, least painful life possible. For the next 6 years i hung about with farriers on yards listening, learning and waiting! I worked as a groom for wedding horses, helped at a show-jumping yard where I got training on how to stay on!, worked as a Scurry Groom(ballast!!!) all over the country even got to do H.O.Y.S and the Royal Show it was amazing. Finally at 16 I managed to convince Warwick College that I could and would be a farrier. At that time I was one of the very few girls country wide training to be a farrier. Thankfully over the last few years that has changed and many more female farriers are qualfing. After something of a nomadic life in training from Kent to Surrey to Yorkshire(god its cold up there) to Devon and now back home to Kent I have worked on miniature Falabella through assorted riding, driving, jumping, racing-oooohhh yes I have shod a few winners in my time and no I never bet on them but enjoyed their win's all the same. So that's pretty much me really I've ridden for nearly 20 years on a motley variety of lovable beasts. I've tried most styles, even did a bit of side saddle!! some western and driven everything from Shetlands to a team of 6 Percheron. I have blobbed along on lazy hacks, ploughed fields behind magnificent beasts. Basically brushed and fed my own stobborn, old war horse, nutcase rescue cob-gorgeous,unrideable, expensive, field ornament that she is. You got to be slightly mad to love these big beasties but then you know that or you wouldn't be reading this. Thanks for taking the time to read my story, maybe we will meet one of these days.