What have you done today with your Austin Seven

[David Stepney]

Young Leon has been busy over the last few months training a 15.2 hand cob ('Blaze'), bringing him from a recalcitrant youngster to being a reliable ride and drive horse. There is still much work to do with him, but, as part of his training, on Thursday, Leon rode him the 5 miles from his paddock in the Berwyns down to home to get Blaze used to traffic and as a confidence building exercise for them both.

Blaze bed and breakfasted (on my apple tree!) overnight in the garden and we took him back to his quarters yesterday afternoon after Leon had groomed him and then ridden him down to Bala Lake and back

As the Seven had not been out for a week, I decided that I would use the little car as the tender to follow Leon back. The A4391 was surprisingly busy bit most of the motorists were courteous. The technique we used was for me to drive from layby to layby and then walk back to meet Leon and Blaze, warning traffic as I went. I was interesting to see lots of interest and photo taking both in the horse and the car and several people stopped to chat to us as we made our way. One person, seeing me walking back from the Seven in the direction that the Leon was coming stopped to see if I was alright, which I thought was kind.

As we got onto Bwlch yr Eira, it started to rain, and by the time we had got to the horses' paddock we were soaked. I also discovered that the Seven's roof has started to leak, a wet patch appearing at the drivers side rear of the headlining, so tracing and fixing that will be a task for this week.

having settled the horses down, we then went over to see a 77 year old friend of ours who had managed to fall off the roof on his bungalow the previous day cleaning moss from the roof. Fortunately, he was not badly injured, but has broken his shoulder so will be out of action for a few weeks.

Not many photos I'm afraid as I had forgotten that I had used the little Kodak several days before and had used up part of my precious allowance of 8 shots. However, her is what i have got of our adventure:


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All tacked up and ready to go


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On our way!

And finally, A photo of the seven with a rather smart Mercedes 350SL taken in Bala a few days previously:


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