The Borders Festival of the Horse is on just now. My granddaughter Caledonia is keen both on riding and gymnastics, so I took her along to the display of horse vaulting on Wednesday evening at the Riding for the Disabled arena at Monteviot.
I suppose the vaulting on the leather horse that we used to do in gym classes originated from the sport. Or maybe it was the other way round.
Certainly it wasn’t an equestrian discipline that I remember from my own young riding days, or my childre
n’s. Apparently it originated in Germany. Maybe, like the “riding at the ring” which is a highly-competitive horse sport on the borders of that country and Denmark, it has a long history there.
At any rate, it seems to have stayed there for a long time – and the Borders was where it first took off in Britain, at a wet summer camp of the Lauderdale Pony Club.
Now it must be popular world wide. A young friend in France went for her first riding lesson. How did she get on, I asked. O, fine – she was standing up on the horse by the end of it. It took me some time to puzzle this out.
In vaulting, the horse is on a lunge rein and the vaulters don’t control it – the person on the end of the long rein does, by using it and a long lungeing whip.
The horse goes at an incredibly slow canter in a large circle and the vaulter runs along beside it, then by clasping a strap on a tight bellyband around the animal, swings onto its back (These are not ponies, by the way, but horses of nearly 17 hands). There’s no saddle, just the bellyband and a cloth. Once aboard, the vaulter – I advisably don’t use the word rider, because it’s so different – carries out a series of exercises on the horse’s back.
The vaulters go two and even three up. They take turns on the horse, changing so adeptly that the horse’s back never seems to be unoccupied.
They wear sleek catsuits (the ones at Monteviot were wearing them in colours that reminded me strongly of something – then I remembered what it was – Wimbledon ball boys). They don’t wear hard hats – the presenter explained that, first of all, the horses are always highly trained, and the vaulting is always carried out on a prepared surface.
But most of all, a hat – or ordinary clothes – could actually be dangerous, getting hanked up with the horse’s equipment or with other riders. The girls wear their hair scraped back like ballerinas.
There were more than 30 youngsters taking part at Monteviot, ranging from what looked like a five-year-old to very competent twenties.
But most impressive perhaps was the team of half a dozen little boys from Riding for the Disabled. For them, participation had given them tremendous physical development, concentration and a discipline which they adhered to as completely as anyone.
The Borders has more vaulting groups than any other part of the country, and more RDA vaulting groups – four of them. It’s a record to be proud of, as well as that of the local teams who have gone on to international glory in this unusual sport over the years.
The Horse Festival programme is a varied and exciting one.
