August 31, 2023
I thought I’d found all my old diaries, but this one showed up in a box of stuff in my old room on our recent Ireland visit. There is almost nothing interesting in it. It spans 1996 through 1999, running concurrently with other diaries I was keeping at the time. It’s all horses. I wrote down every detail about every horse I rode in my weekly riding lessons. I gave a lot of airtime to the preparations for and results of the regular jumping and cross-country competitions I rode in. The only juicy stuff is the minor pre-teen girl dramas that played out amongst the group of us who spent our free time ‘helping’ out around the yard, which I also recorded in detail. But mostly, this diary is full of horses whose names ring some dusty bell in my mind, and who are now almost certainly long dead.
One entry though, from July 26, 1999, touched a sore spot when I came across it. BIG NEWS, I wrote. Brackenstown Equestrian Centre, where I learned to ride and then spent all of my free time from 1993 to 1999, was closing down. “It’s becoming a livery stables,” I reported, naively. That would have been nice. All the land, the vast span of fields and wooded valley where it’s fair to say the bulk of my childhood’s happiest memories took place, was sold to developers and filled with houses.
Last summer, during our Ireland visit, I found myself one afternoon driving north along the M1 with Elliott asleep in the back. God, he slept so little on that trip. Driving while he napped felt like a luxurious break. Without thinking too much about it, I went past the airport and took the third exit off the roundabout at the Coachman’s Inn. Going along the Naul Road, I wondered whether I’d remember the right turn that would take me towards Brackenstown or whether I’d have to stop to check Google Maps, but I didn’t, I did, I remembered it all. I drove extra slowly, going by feel, and as I was just beginning to feel as if the twin pillars that marked the entrance to the stables should be just coming up, there they were, two pillars, almost the same, but no, different, no gate, smooth blacktop where once there was a dirt track, and I turned right into the housing estate now known as Knocksedan Demesne. The houses, which I expected to look brand new but didn’t, were big and sort of ugly in that early Celtic Tiger kind of way, I could tell they would have been sold as upmarket homes at the time. There was nobody around. At the back of the estate, behind a row of trees and a boundary fence, I could make out some old and very familiar buildings. The old barn with its corrugated green roof was just visible, and it looked as though one of the stable blocks was still standing. I couldn’t get close enough to see much, and I didn’t want to leave Elliott sleeping in the car while I hopped out and went snooping in the trees. A year later, even those old remnants are now gone, replaced by yet more houses newly built in an expansion of the estate.
Later, I looked up Knocksedan Demesne on street view, and was able to click back in time to 2009; the boundary fence looked relatively new then, and no trees had yet been planted in front of it, so that what remained of my childhood memoryscape was in full view, right there at the back of the new housing development, preserved on Google Maps. So much of the old yard was still standing, though shabby and clearly abandoned, and it takes my breath away to see it like this, and to know that it’s no longer there.
I remember Jim Marron, the red-faced, permanently furious owner of the Brackenstown Equestrian Center and the land on which it sat, the man who sold it all out from under us, we teenage girls who felt we owned the place. He died in 2006, from what I can tell. The company he established at the time of the sale, Marron Agricultural, went on to become Marron Estates Ltd, the same developers who, in 2021, filed a planning application to build a hotel on the site of Dublin’s historic The Cobblestone pub. The company is worth around 32 million euro.
In early 2019, I started horse-riding again every Sunday, taking a regular weekly lesson for the first time in almost 20 years. I think I’d read somewhere that, in order to be happy, you should think of what made you happiest as a child, and do that as an adult. I’m very susceptible to these kinds of suggestions.
For my first lesson at Brookhill Farm, and every Sunday after that, I was assigned a beautiful dappled gray mare named Miracle. She was tall and slender and spirited and I loved her immediately. I had to (was allowed to, as I saw it) groom her and tack her before each lesson. As much as riding, I had missed the care tasks of horsemanship, and I loved again the feeling of passing a coarse brush across a horse’s back and flank, flicking the dust from her coat and smoothing it over with the palm of my hand. As if no time had passed, I picked up the bridle and coaxed Miracle’s mouth open for the bit while gently pulling the leather up and over her ears, fastening the straps under her jaw and around her muzzle. On that first Sunday, when it was time to mount, someone pointed me towards a mounting block, and I reflexively said no, I can do it. I had no idea if this was true. It sounds ridiculous to say so, but we didn’t have mounting blocks in my day, or it may be better to say there weren’t any mounting blocks at the places where I rode. I tightened the girth and adjusted the stirrup, which seemed impossibly high up now that I was looking right at it. I would be humbled many times in the weeks that followed, as Miracle managed, as horses always do, to uncover weaknesses and fears I’d long forgotten or buried, but in that moment, as I hooked my left foot into the stirrup and mounted this tall horse from the ground in a relatively fluid motion, I felt seventeen again.
Several weeks later, we were all walking towards the large outdoor arena to begin a lesson and the instructor was talking enthusiastically about a hunter trial she wanted us all to sign up for. For the unfamiliar, hunter trials are not actual hunts, they’re just cross-country competitions on horseback, in which groups of riders complete a course with jumps, fences, river crossings, hills and open fields, against the clock. In my experience, it’s a sort of hold-on-for-dear life situation in which the horse you’re riding appears to lose its ever-loving mind and you might as well not be sitting atop it for all the control you have. I enjoy thundering across open countryside as much as the next equestrian, but prefer for it to be as far removed from the frenzy of competition as possible. The instructor was saying that she expected all of her riders to participate, no excuses, she was assigning horses to each of us now and expected us to be there on the Saturday morning, a few weeks hence, when the competition would take place. At first, I just shrugged and said I don’t know if I’m ready for that quite yet, maybe another time. But she kept pushing and insisting. I had just the day before learned that I was five weeks pregnant, barely pregnant at all, but I knew that if I were still pregnant at the time of the hunter trial, I would not want to take part in a high-risk sport where the chance of falling off the horse and crashing to the ground and being trampled was not zero. No, I don’t think so, I said more firmly this time, and this only seemed to encourage her further. I found out later that the entry fee for this trial was $350 per person, and that alone would have disqualified me from participating, but she hadn’t mentioned this, so I couldn’t use it as my excuse. Eventually, I leaned down and tried to whisper but ended up stage-whispering so everyone could hear: I can’t. I’m pregnant. What? she yelled. I’m pregnant, I yelled back. Oh! she said, okay, you can’t ride. Right, I said, laughing, relieved that it was understood I wasn’t just being a sissy about this. No, you can’t ride now, she clarified, you can’t ride at all. She made me get down off Miracle, right there in the arena. I told her that I thought I’d be fine to keep riding for now, at least until I had a bump and she said no, riding can dislodge the implanted fetus from the lining of your uterus and cause miscarriage. I’m not going to be responsible for that, she said, with finality. I have never looked it up or asked a medical professional if this is true. I just resisted doing so right now. I walked Miracle back to the barn and began untacking her. Several people came up to ask what happened, and I had to tell each of them that I couldn’t ride because I was pregnant, even though I was only five weeks along and hadn’t planned on telling anyone, let alone a bunch of strangers at this stables in Virginia.
And that was the end of my return to riding. I don’t have the time or money for it now, but if anyone in central Virginia has a horse and would like me to very inconsistently take care of it and ride it for free, my inbox is always open.
Yours,
Helen.
I am very susceptible to those kinds of suggestions, too. I loved this, especially the driving by feel part. ❤️