Dales Pony

Their job was lead. Until the 1800s, Dales ponies carried ore down from the mines on the eastern slopes of the Pennines to the coast and came back loaded with coal, covering 200 miles a week over rock. A pack pony carried up to 240 pounds and worked loose, in trains of up to twenty. The Fell pony did the same work on the western slopes.

When the railways took the mining traffic, the ponies moved onto hill farms as small draft, carriage and riding animals. Breeders put Clydesdale into them for size, then Norfolk Trotter and Yorkshire Roadster, both now extinct, for carriage work.

The stud book opened in 1916, and then the World Wars nearly finished the breed: ponies were requisitioned and lost in Europe, and by 1955 only four fillies were registered. The rescue leaned on Fell pony stallions in the 1960s, and breeding stock reached North America in 1994.

A Dales stands up to 14.2 hands and weighs 800 to 1,000 pounds. Most are black; brown, bay, gray and roan occur.

You get a small draft-type pony: short back, broad deep rib cage, well-muscled quarters, hard dense bone, large round feet, and straight silky feather on the legs. The movement has real knee action and a lot of energy in it.

The breed standard's words are alert, high-couraged, intelligent and kind, and the society adds a calm, sensible nature; the Conservancy's are docile and spirited.

The Conservancy rates them novice to intermediate. The Dales Pony Society is more specific: they carry heavy adults easily and are kind enough to carry children, but are best suited to competent adult and teenage riders.

Riding and driving. Under saddle they compete in show jumping, dressage, eventing and cross-country.

The distance work is where the history shows: endurance riding and trekking over the kind of country that made them.

The Dales Pony Society calls them very hardy, with an iron constitution, and the Conservancy counts thriftiness among the breed's qualities. The feet are the reputation: hard and well-shaped, large and round, over dense, flat bone.

The Livestock Conservancy lists the Dales as critical, and the UK numbers explain why: fewer than 300 registered breeding females, a world population estimated under 500, and priority status with the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.

A small feral population of about 30 breeding mares still runs in the eastern Pennines.

Ask for the FIS test. Dales ponies carry foal immunodeficiency syndrome, a recessive disease that is fatal in affected foals. A DNA test has existed since 2010, and about 12 percent of the UK population carries the gene. A carrier is a fine pony; a carrier-to-carrier mating is how affected foals happen, so know the status of anything you plan to breed.

Registration runs through the Dales Pony Society in England. North American stock is recent, descended from imports that began in 1994, so pedigrees trace back quickly to the UK book.

Recent sale prices on HoofnHorn, where there are any, are further down this page.