My husband, Simon, is wary of horses. "Expensive and unpredictable," he says. His passions are looking for fossils and swimming in rivers, the colder the better. But I persuaded him to join me on an adventure – travelling on horseback across Wales from Hay-on-Wye on the English border to Ynyslas on the Irish Sea.
Our trip was organised by FreeRein, a family enterprise that caters for people who have grasped the basics of riding and want to explore the countryside without a guide. It provides horses, accommodation and a choice of dozens of off-road routes in mid-Wales and beyond. These rides are the result of 20 years' research by Will Williams and his son Matt. They are open to anyone over the age of 10, though on unguided trails there must be two people over 18 – all of which makes for a great family adventure for those with older kids.
I was brought up on a farm and have ridden much of my life. Simon learned to ride in a brief burst of enthusiasm when we first met. He's ridden barely a dozen times since, but was up for a challenge that would take us across moor and mountain. Our older daughter Miranda, who rode a succession of naughty ponies as a child, was home from university and decided to join us. As annoying as parents are, Miranda reckoned we were worth putting up with if there was an adventure on offer – and there was little chance of bumping into anyone she knew in the depths of Wales.
So there we were on a sunny morning at FreeRein's HQ, an old coach house just outside the village of Clyro in the Welsh Marches. In front of us were two stacks of laminated sheets: OS maps with our route marked as a green dotted line, and written instructions for finding the way. Many of the rights of way we'd be following have no signposts.
Our horses awaited. They'd been chosen to match our height, weight and ability: Archie for Miranda, Florence for me, and the unflappable Fraser for Simon, who was quietly miffed that I had described him as a novice rider. With our briefing from Matt complete and our saddlebags stashed with spare clothes and waterproofs, medical kit and emergency snacks, we trotted down the oak avenue and out into lanes sweet with the scent of honeysuckle. Ahead of us were six days of riding.
Our first day took us up across a common called the Begwns, where we trotted along wide turf tracks with views stretching in every direction. We meandered along bridleways through woods and meadows, past tiny Llanstephan church with its 13th-century nave, and across the rushing Wye river on a wooden suspension bridge to Llanerchcoedlan Farm, near Llyswen, home of the Phillips family.
Vicki Phillips brought cups of tea out to the farmyard as we untacked the horses and gave them their feed of pony nuts before turning them out in a field nearby. She told us about a secret swimming place deep in the woods, so before supper we slithered down a mossy bank to take a quick dip in a stream orange with peat, ducking behind a waterfall to look back at the gorge through the curtain of icy water.
Over the week, as we ambled gently westwards, we slotted into roles: Miranda as map reader, me as chief gate-opener and reader of the instruction sheets (example: "Follow the stony track until you reach a gate. DO NOT GO THROUGH THIS GATE. Turn left along the side of the wood") and Simon as bemused observer and trainee trekker.
Day two saw us cantering across miles of springy open moorland and skirting an army firing range. We passed a quarry where Simon found a handful of trilobites in the shale. Later we dismounted to lead the horses down a long and precipitous slope to the small town of Llanwrtyd Wells.
The other breakfasters at the Trout Inn in Beulah smiled as we ate our porridge: the weather forecast was grim. First it drizzled, then, as we met the Towy river, it bucketed down. Simon was strangely silent; he didn't point out a rock formation all day. Asked how he felt, he said: "Some parts of my body hurt a bit."
Another three hours passed before we reached Pontrhydfendigaid, where we were booked into the Red Lion. At the farm on the edge of the village where the horses were staying, 14-year-old Leah offered her soggy visitors a lift down the farm track. "I'm not a bad driver considering I only started learning three days ago," she said as we careered backwards and then jumped forwards in third gear.
We got lost twice – but never for long. Once we took a wrong turning, and once we missed a gate and found ourselves plunging through a tussocky bog. All three of us were happy: I loved the sense of moving through a changing landscape, Simon loved spotting buzzards and red kites, and Miranda loved Archie and the huge cooked breakfasts. Much of the time we rode in companionable silence, pointing out things we spotted along the way. We had only one major row – when we were navigating a tricky and unavoidable piece of main road with a bridge, a sharp right turn and lorries thundering past.
At the village of Devil's Bridge, we enjoyed the faded grandeur of the Hafod Hotel, built in the late 18th century and later remodelled in the style of a Swiss chateau. Devil's Bridge boasts spectacular waterfalls and three bridges on top of one another – the lowest one constructed in the 11th century, the middle one in 1753 and the topmost in 1901.
Our first sight of the sea came as we left a forest: a far-off band of blue between hills. Sun turned to torrential rain once again and, making a mess of remounting Florence after a gate, I found myself sitting in a puddle underneath her. I'd forgotten to tighten the girth – a real beginner's mistake.
In the pub at Talybont, we relived the week's mapping squabbles – and woke to clear skies. It was a mere four miles to the wide and beautiful beach at the head of the Dovey estuary. Miranda cantered past me shouting: "I'm winning, Mum!" A second later, Archie did some nifty footwork to avoid a patch of soft sand and she tumbled off, a look of outrage on her face.
As he jubilantly pointed out, the novice husband – who had been cruelly teased for flapping his reins and getting his bridle in a tangle – was now the only one of us not to have fallen off, and he'd started to rather resent the label "novice". He was now a tried-and-tested rider: we'd done it – 100 miles on horseback.
