Shire Heritage

With a clean cut furrow all along[/caption]The sight of a pair of gleaming horses willingly hauling a plough across the countryside is a moving and compelling sight. It is an image of incredible power and obedience; a perfect mix of man, horse and landscape. However, it is an image so rarely seen nowadays that, like so much of our ‘labouring past’ has been sentimentalised, romanticised and used to illustrate a rural idyll that never really existed.
 
 
While appreciating the beauty and poetry of the working Heavy Horse our aim is to restore an appreciation of the contribution that both man and horse made to the agricultural economy and consequently to the creation of modern industrial Britain.
 

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The Shire horse is the most numerous and largest of the heavy horses found in this country. For hundreds of years, the Shire horse has been working with man in close harmony. The Shire horse is the tallest of the modern draught breeds and can be black, brown, bay or grey in colouring. Its distinctive feature is long, silky hair, commonly white, on the lower part of its legs. A stallion may stand to 19 hands high and weigh a ton.

The medieval “Great Horse” came to England in 1066 with William the Conqueror and served in war as a living armoured tank until firearms made it obsolete. As a draught horse, one variety, boosted by importations from the Netherlands, emerged in the Eastern Counties during the 17th century as the “Black Horse”.  In1878, when the pedigree society was founded, the title “English Cart Horse” was adopted, but changed to “Shire” six years later.

After the First World War, numbers declined, but slowly. There were motor-lorries and tractors, but these were inefficient and beyond the means of many in the prolonged Depression. In contrast, the Second World War heralded the abrupt end of the Horse Age.

The last quarter-century has seen the regeneration of the Shire horse. In their heyday, there was a heavy horse population of well over a million animals, but by the late 1950s and early 1960s this had dwindled to a few thousand. Today the Shire Horse Society processes about 500 registrations annually.

The Shire has virtues which now have a special importance. It is favourable to the environment and to conservation. It is conducive to cheerfulness in a population now largely divorced from the natural world. It provides great job satisfaction for many people. The Shire has served man at work and at war. As a proud symbol of our heritage, it now faces a new dawn of challenge and achievement.