Exmoor

It appears in writing for the first time in the Domesday Book of 1086. For most of its history the moor was a Royal Forest, meaning a hunting preserve, and a Crown Warden looked after the land and the ponies running loose on it.

When the Crown sold the Royal Forest in 1818, thirty ponies of the old type were moved to neighboring moorland and became the foundation of the modern breed. The Exmoor Pony Society formed in 1921; the first stud book was published in 1963.

The Second World War nearly ended it. Ponies were stolen for the wartime meat market, and only about 50 survived. The first exports to North America came in the 1950s.

An Exmoor stands 11.1 to 12.3 hands and weighs 800 to 900 pounds: stocky and powerful, deep through the chest and broad in the back. The color is uniform, brown to bay or dun with black points and mealy markings at the muzzle and around the eyes, and the uniformity is camouflage.

The details are all weatherproofing. The winter coat is double-layered, an insulating woolly underlayer beneath longer oily hair; the tail grows a fan of coarse hair called a snow chute; the eyes sit under raised fleshy rims, the toad eye, that shed water; the nasal passages are enlarged to warm air on the way in.

Docile and spirited is the Conservancy's pairing, athletic and intelligent by every account.

They rate as suitable for novices once trained. Part of this breed still lives free, and manners are learned, not inherited.

Riding, driving, showing and agility on the domestic side.

The growing job is conservation grazing. Exmoors are neat, hardy grazers of rough forage, and projects use them to bring native plant diversity back to reserves.

Built to live out is the honest summary: the coat, the eye and the nose are the equipment for wintering outside.

They thrive on rough grazing, taking forage other animals cannot use.

The Livestock Conservancy lists the breed as critical, and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust holds it in its highest-concern priority category. A 2021 UK count reported 95 breeding animals, with a worldwide population of roughly 330.

Numbers have recovered from the wartime low, but the breed remains endangered internationally, which is why the conservation grazing herds matter: they keep ponies living the life that made the breed.

Registration runs through the Exmoor Pony Society, and the breed's value is its purity, so the papers are the point. An Exmoor-looking pony without them is not an Exmoor.

Match the pony to the rider: at under 13 hands this is a child's or a small adult's riding pony, and a driving pony for everyone else.

Ask how the pony was raised. Moor-bred stock comes off a free-living herd and arrives unhandled; stud-bred stock is usually further along. Both are real Exmoors; they are different purchases.

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