Day 1

We all started off at 10am in the morning anticipating the excitement that awaited us, we all chattered about our plans, which included the songs that we finished on the last day. Then we head up the rather stony path on the lookout for Madonna’s house hidden away somewhere in the trees, we narrowed it down to about four different houses which we could see, then realising it probably wasn’t one you could see because otherwise there would be too much paparazzi attention, unfortunately! Although it was possible we saw her chimney!

Crossing over the road we came to an interesting very small pathway through woodland, heading towards Berwick St John. Emily and Rosie shouted back what lay ahead on this treacherous path, it involved some jumping onto the edge of the slippery bank and others careless with their feet tripping down the steps. Along the Ashcombe Lane , we had our first canter where Sam managed to let her minstrels fly away, we didn’t really have brilliant brakes so we got to the end and had to walk all the way back to retrieve them.

Day 1 did bring us a few difficulties around lunchtime, after coming across that there were no gates to get us on the bridle path, but we were surrounded by beautiful scenery at that time. A kind farmer did mention that we might be taking the risky path, as he built his hunt jumps years ago. This concerned us as dear big Toby had only jumped about 1ft9 previously to this expedition. We galloped up the really steep hill before realising it was actually really really too steep for the horses, then we followed the correct bridle path, which lead us to the treacherous hunt jump! Realising the fence was barb wire all round, we turned back on ourselves to find another padlocked gate. We presumed these gates were locked because of the steam fair occurring at the same time... Half an hour later, still there was no way out! We attempted to remove the top bar of the jump, but it wouldn’t budge. So we again trekked around the field to find an open gate, but with a pallet underneath so brave Poppy removed it and we went around the valley to get to a stubble field with another padlocked gate. So this was it... we had no way out, hunt jump it was. Ellie decided she wasn’t that keen to attempt the 2ft3 hunt jump. What were we to do? Poppy rose to the challenge and hopped onto Toby. Emily on the superstar Rosie cleared the fence magnificently and Toby followed suit. He knocked it with his front legs and left his back legs behind...but he was over and we just had to hope that Blaze and Piper would make it over. Blaze unfortunately stopped. Yes he did, let’s just note his is an ex 3 day eventer! His cleared it the next time and then Piper keenly followed.

We did notice we were a little behind schedule and tried to trot a little to catch up, but it wasn’t that pleasant with big rucksacks on our backs. Then we arrived on the dreaded byway, this was a concrete track which went on for miles and miles. If there was one problem with our expedition, we will never ride on that byway ever again! This is when we went off our map, we didn’t have the extra memory map piece. On this ridiculous byway we ate our lunch, Emily’s cheesy breadsticks, Ellie’s chocolate pancakes, Sam’s squishy bananas and Poppy’s cheese rolls.

 We turned off onto the wrong track several times and tried to chase the tractor, unsuccessfully. Then we decided to turn back towards Flamstone farm and managed eventually to follow the compass bearing which lead us through a field of combine harvesters. By this time, we were incredibly tired and bumped into Sarah...she basically told us we were really late and should really gallop to our next destination. Another mistake as we went the right, but wrong way through the village and Sarah was expecting us at the other end of the village. Home we nearly were and we passed a pig farm and Piper was pretty calm, surprisingly after our practice experience! We were greeted by Mary and quickly popped our horses away so we had some time to set up out tent before it was dark as we arrived back at about 6:30pm, a whole 8 hours of riding with no lunch stop... We felt the aches and pains we had suffered from previously on practice ride, but it didn’t really dampen our spirits as we could never stop giggling! Poppy’s tent seemed to have morphed into a different shape since we last used it, as we all couldn’t get the pole into the right place and when we eventually did, the tent cover was VERY wonky.  The window holes were on the corners, which didn’t make much sense, but it did seem to keep us pretty dry. Whilst there we spoke to the Mann’s who were very welcoming and we were all fascinated to watch the chestnut horse follow (with no attachments to the other horse) Mrs. Mann on a hack around some of the fields, just following with no lead rope or wandering off! It was amazing! Something almost as good was their pack of 9 golden retrievers.

At about half eight we went to have our own supper after feeding the ponies, it was our traditional sweet and sour noodles with chicken for the non-veggies. This was of course delicious and we were hoping the dessert would be nearly as good. But unfortunately we’d all had a rather busy weekend, including poppy who had no time to made the homemade pancakes...we had to make do with squished Tesco ones. Despite the chocolate sauce and the other option of lemon and sugar, you could still taste the actual rather gross pancake. So we only ate a few, then chose the best decision which was to throw them away. Next came Ellie’s master plan, TOASTED MARSHMALLOWS, these were yummy even very singed, they were yummy. But some people did manage to drop at least three into the green gloop...oops! We went to bed quite early, well basically Sam fell asleep at about half 9 and slept like a log, so we all decided to do the same, ready for our early rise in the morning.

Day 2

An early start for some in the morning and we were awoken by our alarm at 6:30am bleary eyed trying to consider who would be the first one to attempt putting the tent back into its bag after packing away everything else. Using our fantastic team skills we did this task in no time and grabbed our feed buckets because the ponies always have to come first. During this time we gave the teddies a little treat of riding the ponies bareback. We walked slowly back, proud of how efficient we were and we all ate our cereal bars for breakfast. Around half past 8, Sarah and Lucy had arrived to check we had actually woken up and we still weren’t dreaming in our tents. Of course, as this was to be our brilliant day we had groomed our horses and were nearly ready to be mounted. Despite our utmost effort we were 2 minutes late on setting off on another, hopefully slightly shorter day.

We returned up the track that the day previously we had come down and we had successfully started to moan about painful bottoms. Just thank goodness for the gel seats Emily, Ellie and Poppy had, otherwise by the end they would have probably felt like Sam did.  We negotiated the village particularly well and headed towards another dreaded byway. This one wasn’t quite as bad as the first, but concrete tracks aren’t really that inspirational when trying to think of a song. We chatted about films, like Wild child which everyone but Ellie had seen and One Tree Hill, Gilmore Girls, Hollyoaks etc etc, you can imagine we didn’t stop talking, apart from the odd moment when there was a peaceful silence, and then Sam would ruin it by saying... “So....how is everything?”

 We were doing well on time, but we were a little concerned about Vernditch chase (woods) as we had been told to watch out for the little sneaky tracks that would lead you the wrong way. We adopted a uniform way of passing through difficult overgrown paths, by letting Rosie and Emily clear the way, followed by Toby, Blaze and Piper. After recently learning how to use a compass, we thought it might come in quite handy when faced with a few choices of direction in the middle of the wood. We figured the compasses read the same reading if they were not close to our saddles and headed South East. We cantered through beautiful woodland, (one of the highlights) as Lucy Greenwood had set us a target of being at the main road crossing early. We did it! We were about 15 minutes early when we saw the crossing, so we crossed a rather busy road and then stopped to give the horses (and us) a breather and a sip of water. We had arrived at Martin’s Down nature reserve, where we were educated ourselves (to pass our spare time) by reading the history of the nature reserve as well as the wild flowers and nature that inhabited the reserve. This was very interesting as we realised on the map in the car park, that the bridle path we were meant to be going down (according to the OS maps) wasn’t a bridleway! This threw us a little but decided our route which was virtually the same, we realised afterwards.

We passed the ‘Model aircraft flying zone’, which nearly made up for us changing our route so we missed off the golf courseL. We came across some tourists who ‘awwed’ at our ponies, before we appeared to be a little confused of the correct direction. We had altered our route because Mary said we needn’t do such a long and hard day, so we had changed it a little, but took a small detour along Bowling Green Lane, this was where Poppy’s Teddy flew out of her saddle bag into the brambles...after the Teddy was retrieved we quickly trotted up the path that united us with our original route and we did pass Sarah who was a little confused why she had come across us at that point.

Whitey Top was where we all admired the beautiful panoramic view of the fields below us, then we continued through a field of cows where Ellie was determined to stay in the middle of us, so the cows didn’t eat her first. Next we came across our lunch stop venue, which was located in the perfect Penbury Knoll woods. We were doing great on time and we had reserved a 45 minute slot for lunch on this particular day, so we unsaddled our horses and tied them up to two rather large trees which we struggled to get our bailey twine around. They munched on the grass surrounding them, whilst we and the teddies sat on one of the tree branches eating our lunch. If only we’d recorded the effort that it took to get Sam and Ellie onto this branch... it was quite hilarious! We shared the remainder of our sweets, jelly babies mainly, with the teddies that thoroughly enjoyed completing our aim: to have a Teddy bears picnic.

The nicest riding we probably went over on our venture, was before and after our lunch stop heading towards Cranborne. Rolling hills and long luscious grass whilst looking over the stripy fields were perfect! We were even a little early when we saw Mary and Sarah at the turning off to Boveridge farm. It was quite a long road to reach the farm, but we made it even though we were all quite exhausted. But one thing some of us discovered on day 2, the pain either got really bad or we were just used to it by then. We arrived amazed at the amount of foals in the surrounding fields, we ‘bagzied’ our favourite ones before thankfully taking the large weight off ours and the horses backs. They were then put away into their paddocks shown to us by the Yarrows. We split our jobs, Emily and Poppy went to carry the water, whilst Sam and Ellie put the stuff back into the trailer. This was a good idea as we then could all go and put up the wonky tent together. It was all going smoothly until Sam got Emily and Poppy drenched with the hose, it was rather funny for those watching. On our way to choose our pitching place, we came across some more fascinating dogs, whippets to Labradors to mini Jack Russell’s (which did look a bit like a Chihuahua!) We picked the spot on top of the hill, next to the teddy swing and we could have been worried that if it was windy we might have blown away, but we didn’t really seem to care about that at the time.

As soon as we’d finished putting the tent up, we decided we’d have a race to the loo, so we ran down the small, but steep hill towards the house. Emily, who was at the back, did an accidental flip and fell over. No one seemed to notice that their fellow team mate could have broken her neck as they were rather too occupied with the race. She struggled up with a large grass stain down her leg, but absolutely fine towards the others, who coincidently still hadn’t found the loo. This, of course, started another fit of hysterics between the whole lot of us. Supper was the same, thankfully without the pancakes and the remainder of the marshmallows, followed by a nice cup of hot chocolate which Poppy managed to spill. Emily thought of the bright idea of picking straws for who had to carry the trangia’s on the last day, this was the fairest way, but Emily’s plan backfired and she and Sam got the short straws. So Poppy and Ellie squished everything apart from Water into their saddlebags.  We took advantage of the light to take some pictures of: Teddy goes floating on the water trough, the Teddy bear race, Teddy’s goes climbing, Teddy plays on the swing and Teddy’s try to drive(not to escape, they WERE enjoying themselves!) We went to bed with a new sleeping arrangement, Emily and Sam in the middle, before falling straight to sleep at 9pm.

Day 3

                We were all woke with a startled awakening from Sam, who announced at 7:30am, it WAS 7:30am! Ellie had set our alarm at 6:30pm instead of AM...so we hurriedly gathered our things and pulled the tent down. Despite our late start we were ready by the correct time after having spent about half an hour poo-picking the paddocks. Poppy and Sam had a little problem with Piper who must of had a lot of lush grass the night before, mmmm! We headed up the same road we had the day before.

                The track up to Wimborne St.Giles was fairly boring until we came across a field with a large sign, DANGER BULL IN FIELD. This worried Ellie the most who is exceedingly scared of cows, let alone bulls. We carefully edged ourselves around the edge of the field, until there it was, it was MASSIVE! Luckily none of us were wearing red if we wanted to be superstitious about it. Our ‘bagzie’ system came into use at that gate where the last one to say it got to open the gate, but it didn’t always happen that way normally the most able to opened the gates. Before the main road crossing we finished and perfected our first song which has been recorded on video. The tune is taken from ‘I like Big Butts’ by...........................and here is our version of the lyrics:

I like big butts and I cannot lie,

You other horses can’t deny

When Toby walks in with a really big waist and a round thing in your face

You get MOVED!

                This song was made in remembrance of Toby’s rather big bottom and there was also another which we made later on, which you will have the delight of reading later. But now, here’s our version of S Club 7’s ‘Reach for the stars’ on the theme of the Teddy bears picnic. This was recorded but Rosie looks incredibly grumpy squished between Blaze and Piper..

Reach up for the biscuits,

Climb every tree high

And reach up for the cakes

And when four girls are standing over you

That’s when your dreams will all come true...

Oooh ooh oh oooh ooh (this went particularly badly)

It also wasn’t that great that none of us could sing any notes in tune, X factor here we come! Or perhaps we could amalgamate all the songs...or maybe not! We think it was sometime around here where we met Sarah at a quick bit of road that we needed to go along that was quite busy, they story goes we cantered up this hill along the bridlepath through the field that had been cut for straw, it became quite a tradition we hopped over the piles (like in the practice, when we went thistle hopping twice, once at Abbotsbury and another someplace else.) Fun, Fun, Fun!

 After the main road crossing, we had to follow a concrete road and we were ahead of time, so we took a short break to try out Toby’s bottom for size. We found a 6 bar gate, which Poppy climbed upon and jumped (don’t worry with a helmet and being very careful) onto Toby’s bum. Toby was a little angel and only moved a step, when Poppy slid off. This entertained us and we continued to walk down the track when it turned onto a nicer grassy path. We ate our lunch, of which Ellie forgot, so we donated some of our spare food which she didn’t really need as she was content with her ‘Squares’. This perfect place we found was penned in by 4 large gates with another bridleway running along the side, each pony was tied up to one of the gates, completely un-tacked. They munched away happily, whilst we sat and ate. We tried a bigger and better version of fitting people on Toby, we all squeezed on their, Sam and Poppy on his bum, Ellie in the saddle and Emily on his neck.

                We adopted our uniform order through the bramble filled path that was ahead of us, we fought our way all the way until we came across a really sweet little hamlet off Sixpenny Handley. It was filled with thatched cottages, with wisteria and roses covering the front of the quaint houses. We were amazed at the amount of flowers, one person could fit into a terraced garden, it was literally packed full of potted plants and flourishing flower beds. The pretty scenery meant the road work wasn’t as bad, but it did worry us slightly that the road was kind of never ending, when it didn’t look that long on the map. Finally (It might have been because we were dawdling) we took the Byway at the turning off which looked like a very pristine dairy farm.  We were apprehensive about what this byway was going to be like due to past experiences. But it was the kind of byway not many other type of vehicle could travel up, apart from possibly walkers and people on quad bikes. To spend our time along this track, we created another one of our songs. This again was about Toby’s bum, to the tune of ‘Stacey’s mum’. Here are our lyrics:

Toby’s bum has got it going on,

It’s all I want and I’ve waited so long.

Blaze can’t you see your just not the one for me

I know it must be wrong,

But I’m in love with Toby’s bum

This tune was replicated for the song of Rosie’s tail, it just so happened their assets, Piper’s eyes and Blaze’s teeth didn’t rhyme without difficulty, so unfortunately we decided we couldn’t make a song for them. Also we didn’t record this one on film for some reason we cannot recall.

Rosie’s tail has got it going on,

She’s all I want and I’ve waited so long,

Pipey can’t you see, wonky tails not for me

I know this can’t fail

Cause I’m in love with Rosie’s tail.

Rosie’s tail could do the amazing trick of flicking onto her back whilst she was having a loo break..anyway it was all going well with the map reading; we got to Bigley Buildings and turned in the correct direction heading home. On the side of the track we were following there were two perfectly placed logs, we couldn’t resist and all four of us dropped our rucksacks and jumped them, even Toby who sort of walked over them! Everything was good until we started off again; Toby misplaced his feet and trod on the back of Blaze’s heel. A mistake which lead to Emily sacrificing her sponge (used to stop the rucksack rubbing), Ellie giving the last drops of her water and Sam providing the horsey first aid kit. What a team effort! Poppy used here brilliant ‘B’ test standard bandaging skills to mop up most of the blood flow with the sponge, applying wound cream and then wrapping it all up. It was pretty good since it stayed on the whole of the way home.

                This did jolt our schedule slightly, but we wondered along the road until we came across familiar territory onto the Madonna track. It was surprising how long this track actually was, but we finished in style. As we turned the final corner, (you’d think we’d been away for a week, but it was only 3 days) we started to sing our version of ‘reach up for the stars’, we were full of different emotions, some of us in desperate need of sleep, a comfy bed, but it was really sad it had to be ending! Most of us with lighter backpacks that day, felt fine without backache!  We were greeted by a swarm of parents glad to see us well and STILL smiling. It was an incredible experience, it brought us together as an even stronger team, we didn’t argue or squabble and the horses looked exhausted but it’s no doubt that they enjoyed it just as much. We were only a few minutes late, due to the minor injury, although it was an impressive day! We’d like to thank the organisers, Mary, Sarah and Lucy for getting us ready for this expedition. Also our appreciations go to ours hosts, the Manns and the Yarrows, our accommodation was beautiful! And we couldn’t forget the parents who brought us there and took us home to our houses, which now seemed like luxury after sleeping on dismal roll mats.