What to expect

When you keep your horse at livery with us or visit us for courses, clinics or regular training you can expect many benefits:

• We provide an opportunity to keep, train and ride horses in a way that helps them stay - or become - healthy and happy, is good for the environment and is manageable for every owner/rider.
• Our aim is to foster happy horses and riders who are sound in mind, body and spirit. The environment at the centre is calm, safe and supportive with staff and methods that put your horse’s best interests first.
• Thanks to our first-hand experience, a constant search for knowledge and contact with some of the best teachers and trainers in the modern world, you will have access to the skills and methods that have helped even the most ’difficult’ of horses become "light to the hand, light to the leg, comfortable to ride and trustworthy".

"Jo and Derek Clark follow a totally holistic approach to caring for and training horses. They have a very empathic way with the animals in their care and endeavour to explore many avenues to help the horse. They follow post-treatment advice to the letter and their method of training appears to actively support the musculo-skeletal system, thereby enabling horses to recover from injury or dysfunctional movement patterns caused by previous history of poor body use."
Sue Connolly, Equine Muscle Release Therapist and Human Bowen Therapist

Our approach and guiding values

Our approach to training horses and riders is based on French classical principles. Towards the end of the 19th Century, General Alexis L’Hotte, regarded as one of France’s greatest ever horsemen and the former head of the Cadre Noir, wrote that all the goals of training (for riders as well as horses) can be summarised by the motto ’Calme, en avant et droit’ (calm, forward-thinking and straight) and he stressed that the order is extremely important.

We put HORSES FIRST by seeking first to understand, then be understood. We respect the philosophy ’First, Do No Harm’ and we keep our horses in barefoot herds in a way that’s as close to their natural lifestyle as possible. We believe that lightness must be the means of training and not just something that (maybe) happens later on.

We encourage PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. To us, each horse is a unique and valuable sentient being, just like his or her rider. We appreciate that every artificial aid, technique or method has its advantages and disadvantages. We believe in violence-free training and also in setting boundaries and having good discipline. We encourage every instructor, rider and owner to make informed decisions in the best interests of the particular horse based on knowledge and understanding.

Our business model is based on long-term, mutual FINANCIAL VIABILITY, not profit at any cost. We strive to offer a fair exchange of value through serving our clients to the best of our ability.

We choose an attitude of LIFE-LONG LEARNING. We believe that people and horses do the best they can with the (mental and physical) resources they currently have available. While always searching for better methods and useful resources ourselves we are also passionate about sharing what we've discovered - often the fruits of experience gathered over many centuries by other, sometimes little-known 'students of the horse'.

We are committed to living, working and keeping our horses in PLANET FRIENDLY ways. Our management plan for the centre includes restoring our 50 acres of grazing to herb-rich medieval pasture - which will mean planting new hedgerows as well as creating wildlife ponds. We minimise our production of landfill rubbish by recycling wherever possible - all of the muck our horses produce is composted for return to the land and we use RedBed to reduce our need for bedding materials. All our feeds are GM-free and we follow a holistic worming regime based on worm-egg testing that allows us to minimise the amount of toxic chemicals introduced to the environment.

What makes us so different?

As members of many successful world championship and Olympic (rowing) teams, Holistic Equitation Centre founders Derek and Jo Clark have a deep understanding of what it takes to achieve excellence and long-term stability in performance and know that it can be achieved using ethical principles that benefit all those involved.

• We believe that high performance and happy, healthy horses are not mutually exclusive and Holistic Equitation is all about having both. Over many years we’ve encountered and tested a whole range of ideas and information while putting our own horses’ interests first and continually seeking ways to improve their well-being as well as their performance.
• We choose not to use side reins, draw reins, tight nosebands or any other form of coercive training aids as we have simply found them to be, at best, unnecessary and at worst extremely damaging. While we’ve often heard that tools like these are ’OK in the right hands’, we’ve never found them to be essential if the trainer is educated in effective alternative methods.
• Holistic Equitation is our way of making the information and knowledge we’ve encountered - and some of the people we’ve met - available to a wider audience so that more people can have a greater range of choice in how they keep, train and ride their own four-legged friends.

Now that you understand a little more about our approach and what kind of results you can expect, click here to meet some of the horses and people we’ve helped and see what our clients are saying about us.

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