Show of horse power as coaches set to parade through Stratford on charity drive
THE romance of the open road, combined with the style of the 19th century, is coming to Stratford.
Two beautiful horse-drawn carriages will be outside Shakespeare’s birthplace at midday on Tuesday 8th October ready to set off on a four-day, 60-mile adventure.
The team of eight horses and 24 humans will parade around town before travelling through Hampton Lucy, Honington, Moreton, Kingham and Fulwell.
The final stop will be Woodstock on Friday 11th October, where they’ll drive through the grounds of Blenheim Palace.
As they pass through towns and villages, they’ll stop for lunch at inns as coaches would have done 200 years ago, and each night the horses will be comfortably bedded down in stables, while their drivers and passengers hole up at a hotel.
Along the route they’ll collect funds for cancer charities Prostate Cancer UK and Breast Cancer UK.
One of the coaches, Nimrod, will be drawn by four powerful Gelderlander horses, while the other, Monarch, will be pulled by rare-breed British Hackneys.
This isn’t the team’s first expedition, as they’ve already completed Windsor to Warwick Castle, London to Portsmouth and Snowdonia National Park generating cash for Help for Heroes, Barnardo’s and Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital.
The trips are all self-funded, so 100 per cent of donations go to the charities.
Colin Pawson, who’ll ride on top of Nimrod carriage and blow a horn to announce arrival and departure, said: “People are gob-smacked when they see the horses and carriages in real life – they’re much more impressive than in photographs and both stagecoaches are faithful reproductions of what you’d have seen on the roads in the 19th century.
“They were the equivalent of today’s buses or trains and people would buy a ticket to ride.”
Colin, who’s been carriage driving since 1979, explained there’s only enough room for four indoor passengers so these seats were more expensive and if you sat there, you were an ‘insider’.
Those who had to make do with the cheap seats on the roof were ‘outsiders’, while those on the end were ‘rank outsiders’.
If they’d had too much to drink at an inn, they might fall asleep and tumble off, hence the expression ‘dropping off’.
The carriages weigh just under a ton, which is why they need four horses to pull them.
But Colin added: “We’re always thinking about the welfare of the horse, which is why we only travel 15-20 miles each day and take it gently.”
