Diligent readers will know that “hack” (short for “hackney”) originally meant “horse for hire”.

I’d no intention, when adopting the title, of any involvement with real horses. Indeed, the last time I was on the back of a hoofed mammal was in 1969, aged four at Longleat House. A donkey “race” ended abruptly with my mount deciding halfway round that it was going no further. It lay down in the paddock, trapping my leg and filling my special lucky blue nylon shorts with sand. Not so lucky after all, nor the last time I would feel stymied in my competitive efforts by being allied to a complete ass.

I must have silently vowed to never get on an animal again. But that changed at the weekend, when I found myself £80 the poorer, with the hack family on four real hacks of various sizes heading across a river bed and up a rocky path in Exmoor’s Doone Valley (home of Lorna Doone). This was the first of our deliberate attempts to Continue reading ‘back in the saddle’