PONY Bloggers: Meet Flora and Bramble!

Hello, I’m Flora, I’m 10, and I have been reading PONY Mag for a couple of years. I live in southwest England and I’ll be sharing some of my pony adventures with you in my diary. I have a loan pony called Bramble – she’s a 14hh, 18-year-old New Forest and can be very whizzy, a bit silly and sometimes lazy, but I always love being with her and we have a really special bond.

This month we’ve been building up to a Pony Club dressage competition and my first Arena Eventing season, so there’s been lots of training going on! Before Bramble came to live with us she’d done lots of cross-country but not much dressage at all, so in both disciplines at least one of us is learning!

Recently, on a super windy day, we hired our friend Anna’s arena to do a dressage practice (great idea, Mum). There weren’t any arena markers, so we’d made paper ones and taped them onto the fence, which was soooooo flappy and obviously super scary for Bramble! I tried my best to rehearse our walk and trot dressage test but Bramble was petrified of our makeshift letters and refused to even go near them! It was only when we left that we realised there were letters hiding behind some poles! Whoops!

Next up, we did a practice run for the Pony Club dressage test at a local showground where Bramble was unfortunately scared of the judge’s car, although I couldn’t work out why. I was very surprised that I managed to keep her within the dressage boards as she was completely refusing to go anywhere within five metres of the car at the start of the test. Anyway, we got 63%, came 2nd, and qualified for the Championships so we must have done something right!

We’ve also been arena eventing schooling and Bramble was a very good girl! She did stop to have a look at a cross-country fence and we had to work on our straight lines for the narrow fences, but we had a really good time with my instructor Emma, and I finally persuaded Bramble to jump round the whole course with no stops! Yay!

We’re lucky enough to have some gallops not too far from home, and so the other weekend we loaded up for a trip to them. There is a really steep hill on the gallops, but Bramble managed to canter up not only once, but twice! I had a really great time, and Bramble thought she was a racing pony! I’ve never galloped so far and my legs were aching by the end, but I would do it again in a flash!

After all the hard work and prep, it was finally time for our Pony Club dressage. So… let me tell you something about Bramble. When we go jumping, she’s super speedy, even if we’ve entered two classes. Well, on the day of our dressage competition I learned something new about her – the same does NOT apply when there are two dressage tests to be done. We did well in our first class, scoring 77% which left us in individual 3rd and the highest place member of my Pony Club in the class. I was excited for the second test, but it turns out Bramble wasn’t as keen, and she engaged donkey mode to let me know she wasn’t impressed. Needless to say we weren’t placed, but it was overall a great day and, to top it off, our team won!

That’s all for now, but I’ll be back soon to tell you how we got on at arena eventing!

Follow along Flora and Bramble’s adventures in their next blog post, and stay tuned as soon we’ll be meeting our next PONY blogger!