The year-and-a-half: training horses in Counties Roscommon and Longford

Around the turn of the century a man in the Curraghboy district of south Roscommon in the Irish Midlands, having reached the final stage in the breaking in of his recently purchased year-and-a-half-old horse, harnessed it to a cart and, not without trepidation, drove out on the public highway for the first time. Two or three neighbours, noted for their skill with horses, who had taken part with him in the initial stages of training the young colt, accompanied him. All were on the alert for any eventuality. They completed a circuit of seven or eight miles without mishap, or misbehaviour on the part of the animal, which conducted itself so sedately throughout the journey that the man was able to boast afterwards that they met a policeman on a bicycle ‘and it never knocked a stir out of him!’.