Choosing your horse
Breed does not decide everything, but it decides enough. What each one was bred to do, how big it gets, and what it costs to keep.
Horse name generator
Stable names and show names, generated from the habits British yards use. Press it as often as you like.
What is a wall-eyed horse?
A wall-eyed horse is one with an excessively pale eye, or with two eyes of different colours.
Why do some horses have blue eyes?
Blue eyes in horses come from the genes that place pigment, and there is more than one route to them.
Dun or buckskin: what is the difference?
They look alike and they are not the same thing: dun and buckskin come from two different genes.
What is a bay horse?
A reddish-brown body with black mane, tail, lower legs and ear rims. The black is the interesting part.
What is a coloured horse?
"Coloured" is the British word for a horse marked in white and one other colour, and it has a registry definition behind it.
Piebald or skewbald: what is the difference?
Piebald is black and white. Skewbald is white with any other colour: brown, red, bay or chestnut.
What is a blagdon horse?
Blagdon is the British name for the pattern known elsewhere as sabino: irregular splashes of white, often roaned at the edges.
Horse names
Most horses have two names: a long one on the passport and a short one everyone shouts across the yard. Ideas for both, and the rules if the horse will race.
What is a palomino horse?
A gold coat with a white or pale cream mane and tail. It's a colour, not a breed, made by one copy of the cream gene on a chestnut horse.
What is a grey horse?
A horse born bay, black or chestnut that whitens over the years because of a single dominant gene. In Britain, a white-looking horse is a grey.
What is a chestnut horse?
A red horse with no black hair anywhere on it, from pale gold to dark liver, with a mane and tail the same colour as the body or paler.
What is a roan horse?
White hairs mixed through a coloured body, with the head, lower legs, mane and tail left solid. Unlike grey, it doesn't whiten with age.
Andalusian horse
Spain's baroque horse: thick mane, arched neck, the breed that built the classical riding hall.
Appaloosa
No two Appaloosas look the same, the spotted breed of the Pacific Northwest.
Arabian horse
A millennium of selective breeding: refinement, fine bone, the foundation of every modern light-horse breed.
Black horse
Black is a coat colour, not a breed. In the UK the black horses you see most are Friesians, Fell and Dales ponies, Shires and cobs, and true black, with no brown at the muzzle or flanks,…
Cleveland Bay
England's oldest established breed, and one of the rarest in the world.
Cob horse portraits and prints
The family horse for half the country, cobs do the school-master job for a generation.
Connemara pony
Ireland's native pony: limestone-bred, often grey, often the family's eventer.
Friesian horse portraits and prints
Pure black, abundant feathering, long mane: the dramatic Dutch breed.
Haflinger
Chestnut with flaxen mane, Tyrolean origin, the family pony with a 30-year working life.
Hanoverian
The branded H, the German register that has produced Olympic medallists for two centuries.
Hunter horse portraits and prints
Bone, substance, day in deep going: the British hunter is a type that survives.
Irish Sport Horse
Tough, kind, brilliant over a fence: the working amateur's eventing horse.
KWPN Dutch Warmbloods
Ster, Keur, Elite: the Dutch sport horse studbook and its earned predicates.
New Forest pony portraits and prints
Hampshire-born, semi-feral, the British family's native pony.
Paint Horse
Tobiano, overo, tovero: every Paint Horse is visually unique by genetic design.
Quarter Horse
America's working stock horse: sprint speed, cow sense, the dominant breed of the global horse register.
Shetland pony
The smallest British native pony with the biggest personality on the yard.
Shire horse
The Shire is the British heavy horse: stallions stand at least 17hh, it was bred for the plough and the brewer's dray, and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust lists it as At Risk.
Thoroughbred horse
A Thoroughbred is a horse recorded in the General Stud Book, bred for racing and prized for speed. Most go on to a second career after the track.
Warmblood horses
Hanoverian, KWPN, Trakehner, Holsteiner: the European sport horse register family.
Welsh pony portraits and prints
Four Welsh sections, four different ponies: the breed family that runs British Pony Club.
