Event at Fairoak Grange, Ashford Hill
After our very exciting TREC outing in April, I decided to take my horse, Surprise, out to as many events as I could this year where she would be surrounded by horses she did not know. This is to bring her excitement level down in these situations so that our next TREC will be calmer! Two of the things we have done are Horse Agility and TREC obstacle training.
We did a Horse AgilityPlaydaywithcompetition at Worting. This was great fun. Horse Agility is done in-hand with a slack lead rope, so depends mostly on voice commands and body language. Also your horse needs to trust you. It started with a short talk and then we were able to spend an hour or so practising various obstacles in a small field. Ingrid gave us all individual advice depending on our various issues. Surprise was very distracted by the other horses and wanted to follow them but Ingrid taught me a way to keep her attention on me.
After that she started doing very well. She happily went through the curtains, past the flags, over the tarpaulin, under the arches, over the plastic bottles and through the ‘scary’ corridor.She is not so good at doing over poles as she tends to knock them with her hooves which is a fault.
After a break for lunch, we had a competition for the 6 horses there. We had to do a set course of 10 of the obstacles. We came joint first with 96/100. Next we had a pairs competition and our pair came second.
It was a lovely informal friendly day out and you could just stop and have a rest and graze in-hand whenever you wanted to have a break. Some people take young horses to do Horse Agility, some take nervous ones to help their confidence and some people just like to compete in-hand.
I enjoyed it so much I booked us in for the Horse AgilityIntro to Horse Agility at Fair Oak Grange in June, followed by Confidence Building for Dressage Horses (ridden) later the same day. Neither of these was a competition but were training events and Ingrid was on hand again to give helpful advice. The horses overcame their various fears in a safe and caring environment. These two events are being held again at Fair Oak Grange in July and August. I recommend them for anyone who would like their horse to be more confident or as a good outing for a young horse.
More details are available on
On 17th June, we did TREC Obstacle Training at Frieze Farm. This was followed by a competition for the 6 horses in our group. After a bit of trouble with horse flies and actually getting her to walk at all, we got a lot better and came 2nd in the competition which I was not expecting! We did some obstacles with full marks, but we did manage to knock over the gate (my foot got caught in it) so we got 0 for that! A lovely morning out in the sunshine and good practise for TREC.
We have also done a Fun Ride which was very enjoyable. I am looking for someone to accompany me on future Fun Rides or Sponsored Rides, so if you would like to ride somewhere new at a sedate pace and not do any jumping, please get in touch with me on
Jo Watson