All the King's Horses

If you visit the Rockcliffe stables where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police keep their horses, you can watch them being put through their paces. Our CFUW Diplomatic Hospitality group met there today, where after a tour of the museum and stables we climbed up to the gallery to see an indoor rehearsal of the famous Musical Ride. All this for free. No red jackets today as it wasn't an actual performance; in any case it was too hot for jackets: 23°C, the highest temperature yet this year.

My group was shown round the stables, tack room and farrier station (where each horse is reshod every seven weeks or so) by an enthusiastic young tour guide called Angela, whose gentle mount, Tess, over 17 hands high, we also met. The Mounties may appear very masculine from a distance but this year, 17 out of the 35 riders in the Ride are women. Each officer concerned spends two years of his or her career in the Musical Ride team and the individual horses, Hanoverians / Thoroughbreds, are selected from the breeding farm at Pakenham where at present there are about a hundred of them. Their foals must have black coats to be considered for the Ride; if not they are auctioned off.

We examined the rack of pennoned lances that the riders carry throughout their performance, the shafts made from bamboo but heavy to hold because of their stainless steel tips which are very sharp. You could kill someone with one. In order to steady her lance—while manipulating the horse's reins with her one free hand—the rider steadies it in a leather holder attached to her stirrup, or if need be, by stuffing it incorrectly down her riding boot.

This year's riders all looked pretty competent to me and the horses knew their movements, whether at a trot or at a canter to the rhythm of the piped music which I'm sure they recognise. We saw them practise The Dome formation, The Bridal Arch, Threading the Needle, The Wagon Wheel, etc. When it came to the last figure, The Charge, the horses were led through it at a walking pace, but the older animals who knew what they were doing, were raring to take it at a gallop, you could tell, and had to be restrained. They finished by practising a March Past, eyes right, then in the other direction, eyes left. There are mirrors on the walls of the arena so that they can see how well they're doing.