AS I turned up the high road to Errislannan on Tuesday morning, a warm feeling came over me. The memory of that road on the way to Pony Club every Saturday morning and, later in my teenage years, every morning of the summer, brought a flood of happiness.

About an hour later, I was on horseback at the top of hill, overlooking the 250-acre Errislannan Manor, with Clifden Bay and the Sky Road in sight across the water and the Twelve Bins mountains out in front. Every hill and gate brings back a memory.

Everyone remembers where they first learned how to ride and for many children in Connemara over the last 60 odd years, it was here, at the home of Mrs Brooks and her late husband Dr Brooks.

As I took in the surroundings, I realised just how lucky we were as children tearing around those hills carefree on the amazing Connemara Ponies, many of which are still there today, aged 30 plus.

Not much has changed – the cobbled yard is tarmacked but still pristine, the tackroom feels like walking back in time; the same smell, same feedbins, although Mr Boots (the resident cat) wasn’t around in my time. The grounds are immaculate and at the sight of the tuck shop in the car park, I felt like going in to order Tayto crisps and a Dairy Milk from Mrs Brooks, the Saturday ritual.

Walking towards the beautiful manor house in front of the lake, which we never visited as pony clubbers – always just traipsed past and gazed adoringly as we made our way to the stable yard, I see the lady herself sitting inside the sunny porch with a book and her beloved brown Labrador Coco at her feet.

Now aged 96, Mrs Brooks is in wonderful spirits, and her spot at the front of house ensures she doesn’t miss anyone, two or four-legged, coming or going from the manor. Joined by her daughter Siobhan (Naughton), we exchange some memories and favourite ponies over the years, although when asked, Mrs Brooks says she “couldn’t possibly choose a favourite”!

The first Connemara mare, Drimeen Dun, arrived to Errislannan from local man Red Martin King in 1958 and “all the others, just about, are related to her. There is something like 16 or 18 generations of her bloodlines here, which is so nice. When you are bringing them up, you just know how they are going to behave because you know how their mother behaved and how their grandmother behaved, you can see all these characteristics coming out,” explains Siobhan.

History

Stephanie Brooks (née Mackworth-Praed) was born in London in 1924 where she lived until the Second World War broke out and her family left for New Forest, which is where her love for riding and hunting grew, like her mother before her. “We lived in New Forest, you had to have ponies there, we used to hunt regularly,” Mrs Brooks explained.

On finishing school, she got a job at Wingfield-Morris Hospital in Oxford as a secretary, and this is where she met Donal Brooks, of the Brooks Thomas merchant providers in Dublin, who was working at the hospital as an orthopaedic surgeon. The pair were married soon after the war ended and had six children: Roisin, Doon, Christopher, Rory, Siobhan and Seamus.

Dr Brooks was aware of Errislannan Manor, having spent many family holidays in the home which then belonged to the Heather family. It went up for sale and when they came to look at it in 1956, it was in a bad state. The back kitchen was under water and buckets hung from the roof, but they were still convinced to buy it. Connemara was still a hidden gem back then.

“Daddy came into money because his father died and he was looking for somewhere to spend it. He heard that the Heathers were selling it and so he came to see it. The first time we came, the house was not liveable. We used to stay in the Clifden Bay Hotel with Mrs Foyle. I don’t remember that much but I used to chase a goose up and down the street apparently, aged two,” Siobhan said.

Little by little, the place was pulled back together. The first year they put in 20 gates and started to re-roof the farm buildings and bought Hereford crossbred cows. After about three years, the house had a new roof and eventually electricity arrived in 1976.

The family would spend all their holidays in Errislannan – Christmas, Easter and summer, when Mrs Brooks would load up the Landrover and drive from England. Soon, when the Connemara branch of the Irish Pony Club was born, she was spending a large chunk of the year in Connemara, from Easter to the end of the summer, with Dr Brooks coming for three weeks to make the hay, until moving permanently.

Stephanie and the late Donal Brooks of Errislannan Manor

Connemara Pony Club

The Pony Club began when Mrs Brooks would drive the Landrover into Clifden and collect all the children who wanted to ride. She eventually applied for and set up the Connemara branch and was District Commissioner until 2003. “I took them all in the jeep, they came gradually, as they wanted,” she explained.

Speaking to her mother, Siobhan added: “How it started was we used to have Church Fete here. You used to do pony riders, I remember you leading the ponies up and down!

“The pony rides were so popular so then she used to take the Landrover into town and bring out the Walshs and the Stanleys, and whoever she could fit once a week. About 15 children used to come out on a Saturday morning and that is how it started.”

In later years, the brilliant yard manager, teacher, coach and young horse trainer Roisin Pryce, who this writer and many more grew up idolising, has taken up the batten of bringing the young people from town.

Pony Club Saturdays were, and still are, the most exciting part of the week for up to 50 lucky children who, after being assigned their pony on the whiteboard, would go out to the fields to catch it, followed by rigorous grooming, feet checking, and tacking up before being allowed to ride.

And afterwards, Mrs Brooks would be on hand to make sure your tack was clean and the stable yard free of dung before going home in the evening. It was a place where lifelong friendships were formed.

Siobhan then took over as DC following her mother’s retirement, a post she held for a few years before relocating to Kerry where she has been for 15 years. “Mummy said I could take some ponies with me and I took two of her best! I breed two foals every other year and they then come up here for their education and normally are sold,” Siobhan said.

Riding to town

The Connemara Pony Show in Clifden is one the biggest events of the year in the local area and Mrs Brooks was nearly always represented by her ponies. “When we first came and used to go to the pony show in Clifden, do you remember Mummy, all the Dublin ponies used to come down and they used to win everything…because their ponies were brushed!” Siobhan remembers with a laugh.

“Yes, they had bridles and brushes and all sorts of mod cons!” Mrs Brooks adds. In those early days, the only way to get to the show was to hack the four miles into town.

Another memory of Siobhan’s is her mother inadvertently backing a three-year-old pony on the way home one year.

“Oh yes we used to ride into Clifden. I remember one pony was a three-year-old and was being led into Clifden. On the way back, mummy was tired and just got on her and rode her home and that was her introduction to riding!”

Upon his retirement Dr Brooks moved full-time to Errislannan and found his passion in garden. He planted many unusual trees and designed the upper garden and its flower beds, leaving the lower garden as an orchard with the herbaceous border on one side and shrubbery at the bottom. It is a member of the Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland Irish gardens for charity scheme.

Another memory which caused laughter during our conversation was that of avoiding the lawn at all times, but especially when Dr Brooks, who sadly passed away in 2003, was watching…a hoof on the lawn and you were in big trouble!

Stallions

For many years, Mrs Brooks kept a stallion in Errislannan and the first of those was Coltsfoot, who arrived with his mother Drimeen Dun, the first pony of their herd.

“Drimeen Dun came with a yearling mare at foot – that was Bracken, who was sold to Sandymount Stud in England, and Coltsfoot was her foal at foot and he was our first stallion. He was a stallion here for a long time.

“We bred from Coltsfoot and then he went down to Lib (Elizabeth) Petch in Cork and when she couldn’t keep him any longer, he came back here and we gelded him aged 21, the vet was horrified! We had a different stallion by then and we couldn’t keep two. He was with the Pony Club for years after that. There are photographs of the children grooming him. He was by Macdara and as a stallion, he was so well mannered. You could nearly tell him not to go onto the lawn and he would wait.

“He was a wonderful pony, he was so good natured,” said Mrs Brooks, so perhaps he vied for that favourite spot.

In April 2019, Elizabeth Petch was featured in The Irish Field saying: “I met Stephanie Brooks, everyone know her, and she is a wonderful lady. I first met her just when we were showing our first stallion and she has been a lifelong friend to me and so kind to us in the interim. Her first stallion was called Errislannan Coltsfoot and I leased him from her for four years. He was old-style breeding, there was no outside blood and we had some success with the ponies he bred.”

Eventually, it wasn’t a safe place for stallions anymore with the children around. “There was always a stallion here in the old days, but then, with having so many children it wasn’t right because the stallion used to live out with the mares and the children were going into the field.”

Judith Faherty out for a hack with Bean at Errislannon Manor in Connemara

Bitless herd

The way of life for the Connemara herd at Errislannon Manor is as idyllic as it comes. They are born on the land and live the majority of their lives without leaving. Looking after them is the aforementioned Roisin Pryce from Clifden, who took her first riding lesson with Mrs Brooks aged eight, and she is assisted by head girl Daria Aerhart from Switzerland.

During our conversation, Mrs Brooks recalls Roisin riding Jester for her at the Dublin Horse Show when she was a senior ‘pony club girl’. After achieving her BHSAI and ICES exams with Iris Kellett in 1987, she spent two years in Switzerland before returning home to work in polo and racing yards and then took a job in the Irish National Stud in Kildare.

Back in Connemara for over 20 years now, Roisin is gifted at training the ponies from birth using natural methods. In recent years, she has moved to making the entire herd bitless, the first bitless herd in Ireland, and all are trained for the Connemara Therapeutic Riding Group, who, with Mrs Brooks’ blessing, used Errislannan as their base before buying a facility. At the heart of Roisin’s methods is horse welfare.

“My background would be very conventional. I had seen a lot of disciplines but was always harking back to the British Horse Society’s motto of ‘proactive rather than reactive to animal cruelty’. That is at the forefront of everything I do,” Roisin said.

“I wanted to educate others on that and set up programmes with Clifden Community School and Carna Community School to bring the cruelty to animal messages to the west of Ireland. If you are running a trekking centre, you don’t want people pulling the mouth of the ponies; that is cruel. When a person can ride and understand what forward means, and understands that you don’t ride off the hand, then of course that is no problem.

“Monty Roberts would have been at Iris Kellett’s when I was training there and I realised there were other ways of doing things. I have been yard manager for 12 years now so every pony during that time I have had since they were a foal. Slowly but surely I introduced them all to bitless riding. .

“It all stemmed from the importance of welfare and it is thanks to Mrs Brooks that she allowed me the freedom and trusted me to develop it. That is a privilege I have been given by her. And not everybody has the privilege of time like I did, I was very lucky,” she added, referring to the fact that the trekking and Pony Club ceases for the winter months, when she does the majority of the young horse training.

Special place

And perhaps that is why the same ponies I rode between the ages of six and 15 in Errislannan are still roaming the hills today. During Tuesday’s ride on the lovely bay gelding ‘Bean’, I spotted plenty of familiar faces including Zara, Stephanie (who came from the Connemara National Park) and Drummer, all well in their 20s and 30s.

“That is the whole point, the ponies here live into their 30s and 40s. It is amazing to observe, that by keeping them as a herd and not over feeding them; I mean we have very little illnesses, issues, vets…we just don’t have it. The average age of our herd are still working away in their 30s. It is of course specific, they are in their own environment. It’s the Connemara pony in Connemara. I want the people to understand what a special thing we have,” Roisin added.

I can hear some emotion in Mrs Brooks’ voice when I tell her the influence she has had on so many people and the fond memories ‘pony clubbers’ of the past have been left with. That must make you proud, I ask? “Well yes,” she said with a smile, before her daughter added: “She has been wonderful that way.”

Wonderful, indeed.