Through every age of history man has been fascinated by the wild horse, and they have been depicted in numerous art forms over many centuries, from prehistoric cave paintings to modern art, cinema and music. Horses live free on all of the world’s continents, often in surprisingly hostile and difficult terrain. From deserts, forests, seashores and steppes, the individual races all have their own legends, histories and stories.

The aim of the Horse Stories project is to tell some of these stories through photography, to visit many of the wild herds in their home environments, and learn about them from the people who work to manage and preserve them. Many of the herds are not considered to be wild at all, but are described as feral horses, because at some point in their history they were actually introduced to the area by man, and later abandoned to roam free and reproduce. The only true wild horse is considered to be Przewalski’s Horse, once extinct in the wild but now returning to the wide steppes of its’ native Mongolia.

The issues in some countries are complex; while conservationists have put many years of work into returning the Przewalski horse to its ancestral home and rescuing a species from extinction, in other places feral horses cause many environmental problems. Australia, for example, was never meant to have hoofed animals, and hard feet cause much damage to delicate alpine vegetation in the mountains. Yet there is a strong cultural attachment to the wild Brumby, which has to be balanced with the difficulties of managing populations and conserving wild lands for other species.  So this project is not just about photographing gorgeous horses in exotic settings, although I certainly hope to bring you some of that, but also telling a more complicated and sometimes traumatic story of people struggling to maintain a part of their country’s culture and history while also preserving its environment, and sometimes making difficult choices along the way.

Part of the inspiration for Horse Stories came from the stories told by children’s authors such as Marguarite Henry who wrote abut the Chincoteague and Assateague ponies in the 1940s, from Mary O Hara’s famous mustangs in the My Friend Flicka stories, and from Elyne Mitchell’s tales of Silver Brumbies in Australia’s Snowy Mountains. These stories fascinated me as a child, and a brief visit to Assateague Island in 2009 fulfilled a childhood ambition, and provided the final impetus for the project.

 My research is uncovering some incredible folklore around the origin of some of the herds, The stories are often of epic proportions; at least two populations are claimed by local legend to be descendants of ponies which swam ashore after shipwrecks. The ponies of both Assateague, and Sable Island off Nova Scotia are actually more likely to have been abandoned after they outlived their usefulness as working animals, but local legend clings to the shipwreck story, and who am I to get in the way of such a romantic history!

Click on the link below to see more images from the Horse Stories project