Exmoor ponies live out on the moor through the worst of the British winter without a rug in sight, and it isn’t luck. Their coat is doing a very specific job, and understanding it is the quickest way to work out what your own horse actually needs.

Exmoor ponies live out on the moor through the worst of the British winter without a rug in sight, and it isn’t luck. Their coat is doing a very specific job, and understanding it is the quickest way to work out what your own horse actually needs.

The Dartmoor pony is a small, hardy animal shaped by wet granite, bad weather and centuries of moorland work. Here is how it came to be what it is, and why its story is still being written.

The New Forest Pony has grazed the same Hampshire heath and woodland for many centuries, shaped by the commoners who kept it and the Forest that fed it. Here is where it came from, what nearly went wrong, and what that history asks of us today.

The Eriskay pony is a small, tough island pony from the Outer Hebrides, once found on every croft and now among Britain’s rarest breeds. This is where it came from, the work that shaped it and how it was pulled back from the brink.

The Paint Horse is a coat pattern with a long history and a stock horse’s build underneath it. Here is where it came from, what it worked at, and how a colour became a registered breed.

The Exmoor pony is one of Britain’s oldest native breeds, shaped by weather, poor grazing and hard work on a west-country moor. Here is where it came from, how close it came to disappearing, and why it still matters.

The Percheron came out of a small corner of northern France and ended up working on farms, roads and city streets on both sides of the Atlantic. Here is where it came from, what shaped it, and why it is still with us.

The Fell Pony is a small, hardy native of the north-west of England, shaped by centuries of carrying, herding and trotting over high ground. Here is where it came from, what its work made of it, and how it came through the twentieth century.

The Przewalski’s horse was never bred for field, road or war, and it came very close to vanishing altogether. Here is how it was described, lost and brought back.