Remembering Willow

Willow came to us as a green four-year-old in 2003 and stayed for twenty years, which is most of a childhood and a good part of a life. Hannah learned to ride on her, fell off her, cried into her mane, and grew up alongside her at the yard.

She was honest and kind and occasionally very stubborn, particularly about gates and puddles. She carried a nervous child through her first shows and a confident teenager through her last, and she never once did anything to frighten either of them.

In her later years she was retired to the field she knew best, where she spent her mornings grazing and her afternoons standing nose to tail with her old friend Bracken. She died in the field in the autumn of 2023, an old and much loved pony. There is a Willow-shaped gap at the yard that will not be filled.