Dales Pony

The Dales is the largest of England's five native pony breeds, alongside the Dartmoor, Exmoor, Fell and New Forest. They come from the uplands of northern England and the ancestry is genuinely murky: Celtic horses that reached Britain in antiquity, the extinct Scottish Galloway and Pennine ponies, and Friesian stock the Romans brought from the Netherlands in the second century. Horse remains from the Roman period were dug up in the Dales in 2009.

Their job was lead. Until the 1800s, Dales ponies carried ore down from the mines on the eastern slopes of the Pennines to the coast and came back loaded with coal, covering 200 miles a week over rock. The Fell pony did the same work on the western slopes.

When the railways took the mining traffic, the ponies moved onto hill farms as small draft, carriage and riding animals. Breeders put Clydesdale into them for size, then Norfolk Trotter and Yorkshire Roadster, both now extinct, for carriage work.

You get a small draft-type pony with feathered legs, real stamina and a lot of knee action. Intelligent and bold.