Exmoor

The Exmoor is the oldest and most primitive of England's native ponies, and the one that stayed itself. Ponies reached the British Isles more than 100,000 years ago, and the Exmoor still looks like the animals drawn on cave walls in France. Stone Age settlers hunted them.

When the English Channel opened and farmers took the lowlands, Britain's hill ponies were cut off from one another and drifted into separate breeds. Most were then crossed with something. The Exmoor was not, because the moor it lives on is remote enough that nobody bothered, and it remains genetically distant from every other British pony.

It appears in writing for the first time in the Domesday Book of 1086. For most of its history the moor was a Royal Forest, meaning a hunting preserve, and a Crown Warden looked after the land and the ponies running loose on it.

They are athletic, intelligent, and built to live out. The winter coat is double-layered. Conservation grazing projects use them to bring native plant diversity back.