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.
Short answer: roan is a pattern of white hairs mixed evenly through the body coat. The UC Davis Veterinary Genetics Laboratory describes classic roan as “intermixed white and pigmented hairs in the body”, while the head, lower legs, mane and tail stay solid colour. A roan is born with the pattern, though it may not show until the foal coat is shed.
Strawberry, blue and bay roan
The name depends on the colour underneath.
- Strawberry or red roan: roan on a chestnut, which gives the body a pinkish look. Many registries now call it red roan.
- Blue roan: roan on a black, which reads as blue-grey from a distance.
- Bay roan: roan on a bay, a red-brown body flecked with white over black points.
Roan or grey?
The two are easy to confuse in a young horse. The difference is time: greys lighten with age and roans don't. A roan looks much the same at fifteen as it did at three, though most look lighter in a short summer coat and darker in winter. A roan's head stays solid through every season, which is the quickest thing to check. The grey horse page covers the other side.
Scars and corn marks
Where a roan's skin is damaged, by a cut, a scrape or a brand, the hair can grow back solid colour with no white in it. These dark patches are called corn marks, and they're a useful sign that a horse is roan and not grey.
Breeding a roan
Roan is dominant, so every roan has at least one roan parent. The VGL finds it in Quarter Horses, Paints, Welsh ponies, Miniatures and Belgians among other breeds, and notes that it “has not been detected in Thoroughbreds or Arabians”. An old belief that two copies of roan kill a foal before birth has been disproved: the VGL's test has found healthy horses carrying two copies.
Roans in Britain
Roan is a familiar colour among British cobs and Welsh ponies and cobs, and a blue roan cob is a regular sight at local shows. It's much less usual in sport horses with a lot of Thoroughbred blood, since the VGL hasn't found the pattern in Thoroughbreds. Among the breed guides on this site, you'll meet it on the cob, Welsh and Quarter Horse pages.
Roan look-alikes
Some horses have white hairs bunched around the tail head and the flanks, with the rest of the coat solid. That's rabicano, a separate pattern. A young grey can also pass for a roan for a year or two, until it starts to lighten. Where it matters, for breeding or for a passport, a colour test settles it. A British passport records colour as well as markings, so it's worth getting the word right when a horse is first registered.
Roans are hard to photograph well, because the white hairs flatten in strong light. An overcast day shows the pattern best, and a photo like that makes a good portrait.
