‘Ring us when you get lost and we’ll come and get you,’ was the reaction of the gamekeeper at the farm where I keep my horses when I told him I was going on a trail ride with three female friends. ‘Really,’ I said, ‘just because four women are going off on a riding holiday does not mean we’re going to get lost and need a man to rescue us. We can read maps, you know. We’ve got a compass. And a TomTom.’
‘Right you are,’ he said, giving me one of his deadpan looks. Which was unfair, I thought, because we were very well prepared. We packed all the required elements in our saddlebags, including the map and directions from the trail riding company.
The problem with maps, however, is that they really can’t do much for you if you don’t look at them. Call it exuberance, call it a moment of blondeness, but as we cantered off across a field at the start of our first day we all assumed that someone else knew why we were cantering in that particular direction. Sadly, no one did.
And it wasn’t until we got three miles further on that someone thought to ask, ‘Where are we, you know, on the map?’ Things can change pretty quickly from idyllic to nightmarish. One minute we were riding happily along the Ridgeway in bright sunshine, the next minute we didn’t know where to turn because the map no longer coalesced with where we thought we were. And that was when the skies turned black and a torrential rainstorm came crashing down on us.
It is at times like these that people’s true characters come out. Friend number one was thoroughly inspired by it all. ‘What an adventure!’ she kept exclaiming. Friend number two developed an addiction to the compass, which she hung around her neck and consulted ceaselessly: ‘We’re facing north…we’re still facing north…we’re facing north-east…we’re facing south…’ All of which was impressive but, as we didn’t know where we were on the map, the fact of whether we were pointing north or not was utterly without consequence. Friend number three came up with all sorts of extreme suggestions for cutting through woods and jumping fences in order to right ourselves. As for me, I proclaimed that the end was nigh. ‘Oh, no, it’s like The Blair Witch Project!’ I wailed. ‘We’ll never get out of this alive!’ But somehow we managed to right ourselves and rode on to our pub stop.
We had gone horribly out of our way and so by the time we reached the Queen’s Arms at East Garston it was 4 p.m. We had to rest the horses for two hours before we could start out again and by that time we only had a few hours before dark. The friend who claimed to be enjoying herself declared the threat of sundown a huge excitement, while the girl with compass addiction resumed her endless search for north.
Just when we thought we were nearing our B&B, we asked a dog walker where we were and instead of telling us we were half a mile from Woolley he looked at our laminated map and said, ‘Oh, I see you’ve got the Queen’s Arms on your route. Well, that’s just down there.’ Yes, we had ridden for two hours in a complete circle. Which of course, was straight out of The Blair Witch Project, as I predicted.
So I flagged down a farmer driving by in his tractor and garbled hysterically, ‘You’ve got to help us! We’re four stupid women and we’ve been riding around for eight hours and we’re going insane and I don’t know how you’re going to do it but you’ve got to get us to Woolley!’ The poor man explained exactly where we had to go but I wasn’t having it. ‘Do you have a mobile number?’ He nodded at me with his mouth open. ‘Give it to me. When we get to the next bridleway junction I’m calling you to make sure we’re taking the right turn.’
I must have convinced him of our utter incapability because we had only gone a few paces when we heard him coming up behind us in his tractor. He waved us to the side of the track, put the tractor in front of us and gave us an escort through his fields all the way to the point where we could actually see our destination. I trotted happily behind our knight in shining Massey Ferguson, enjoying myself for the first time that day. When we were safely installed around a farmhouse table eating home-reared beef I sent him a text. ‘We couldn’t have done it without you,’ I said, and I meant it. The gamekeeper, as always, was right.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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