It seems like a long time since there have been horses in Cow Bay. It’s nice to see that we have them in our midst again. Almost twenty years ago, it wasn’t unusual to come across tracks made by horses’ hooves along the trails in the woods or see young women riding horses along the side of the road. At the time, local resident Evelyn Ramey was the only female blacksmith shoeing horses in the Maritimes. She taught horseback riding to 4H members in Eastern Passage.
These large mammals are both expensive and time consuming to raise and maintain. Their disappearance from the landscape has been fairly quick. I wonder how many horses lived in Cow Bay just before motor cars were introduced. Back then, farmers in the area probably depended on them for farming practices and for transporting their produce to Halifax markets.
Years ago I heard about a cemetery off Autumn Drive, where horses were once buried. Every community must have had such a place to lay to rest creatures that lived their lives serving people side by side. Cow Bay would have been no different. Now, most of the lots on that street have been developed. Only the odd lot, such as the one pictured above, doesn’t have a house sitting on it yet. Whether the cemetery was near the present road or a distance from it, is unknown. Much of the nearby area is boggy.
These days it’s nice to once again see people riding or walking next to horses along the road and see horses grazing in the fields.
There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.
~ Winston Churchill
Photo Credits: Jeremiah Bell
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Have never heard of a horse cemetery before! Lovely to see the beautiful horses. When my friend and I were downstate (near where Gerry lives) last month we saw a man and his son eating breakfast at a local restaurant with their horse tied up outside. That was interesting!
Keeping dogs is hard enough, I know I’m not up to the horse task. The, er, scooping alone is daunting. I go to visit the ones at Bayview Farm up the road. Churchill was right.
It was Alice Walker, I believe, who wrote a poem entitled “Horses Make the Landscape Look More Beautiful.” I count myself lucky to drive past three homes of horses every day on my way to town.
I had never heard of a horse cemetery before either Kathy. (I previously thought all horses went to the ‘glue factory’ once they reached the end of their lives).
The scooping problem might not make them popular visitors in some places around town, but as pointed out by pj, they certainly make the landcape look more beautiful.
horse cemetery is lovely. It is strange how, when one encounters a horse close up, one feels an instant affinity – it is not really a smell, as such, but something very ‘animal’. Must be something inherited from our ancient ancestors.
Though so few people have dealings with horses these days, there have been times when man depended so much on these beautiful creatures, both for travel and farming. It shouldn’t surprise us then, when we find that we can communicate non-verbally with then with so much ease.