By the time the Lickey Drinking Fountain and Horse Trough was unveiled in 1906 the long distance coaching trade had long been overtaken by the railways but the Edwardians were still relying upon horses and draught vehicles for transport of goods and people. It was not, of course, a situation that was going to last for very much longer given the advance in the next few decades of motor transport. Indeed the ‘problem’ with the Lickey Horse Trough is that it arrived too late for us to be able to say it has any meaningful history in terms of equine welfare. Had it been installed a thousand years earlier it might well merit such an accolade! One has to remember the modern road over the Lickey closely follows the line of the Roman Road and even that probably partially coincided with an earlier track.
In the modern world it is difficult to grasp the hardship that horses had for centuries endured in the service of man. Without doubt the way over the Lickey was traversed by packhorse trains and waggoners from very ancient times. But by the mid-Victorian period, the subject of equine welfare seems to have attracted some public concern though this was still a generation before the idea of a horse trough at the Lickey was mooted.
This being the centenary year of the facility it is timely to reflect on the physical strain that horses endured on climbs such as the Lickey. Of obvious importance was the need for horses to be properly watered when coping with hills of this severity. As 1906 arrived, local people may well have seen the coronation of their new king, four years previously, as something to celebrate in a way that would be both patriotic and humanitarian.
It would have been only the most cruel driver who would have refused his horses a drink from the Arrow stream (that runs beside the road at the bottom of Rose Hill). Nonetheless, a further drink at the top of the hill surely provided a well earned bonus. In the coaching era The Old Rose and Crown Inn – conveniently near the foot of Rose Hill - was a posting house where horses could be changed and rested overnight. But this was a luxury that was probably rare relative to the amount of traffic that took this route.
One cause of toil for horses would have been the clutch of quarries that were near the foot of Rose Hill. Prior to about 1830 the only realistic route for transporting stone from these quarries to destinations to the south would have been over the Lickey and one can imagine the sheer graft this spelt for horses. Indeed it is an example of the fact that however much it may have irked animal lovers, the reality was that even with the most caring driver plus the occasional reward of fresh water, horses still had to get loads to the top of some very daunting climbs throughout the land.
There was, nonetheless, much that could be done to alleviate their plight. For example, coachmen had the option to tell passengers they must get out and walk. It was also important for drivers to carry a bucket to ensure they had the means to independently refresh their horses en route, especially in hot weather.
But there was much more. In his book Driving published in 1889, The Duke of Beaufort stressed that much of the secret of successfully getting one’s carriage up a difficult gradient was to ensure the overall management of the team was expertly done. For example, he said, good journey planning and the avoidance of thoughtless demands in terms of speed and mileage would get the horses to a hilly section of the journey in good fettle. Equally important, he felt, was the need to judiciously relieve the ‘pull’ on the lead horses when going along the flat! He advocated ‘coasting’ them over normal terrain and – in his words – “only call on them for extra assistance going uphill”. He explained that the leaders will then “catch hold of their bars and assist in mounting the hill”...
The reason for this advice seems to be that, according to the Duke, the horses at the front of the team always tend to do most of the work while those behind tend to “coast”. He said that even skilled drivers would find it difficult to effectively goad the followers so the trick seems to have been to tackle the problem the other way around, ie. to slacken the tug of the leaders, thus ensuring they would not be worn out by the time the first hill was reached!
But perhaps of greatest importance in terms of horse welfare was the need to carry out an adjustment to the harness of each horse whenever a serious hill was encountered. The adjustment entailed loosening the bearing rein and if this routine was not carried out the horse would be unable to adopt a natural stance as he struggled up the gradient. Concern that drivers should care for their horses in this way led to wayside signs being erected to remind them. Bromsgrove Society member Graham Stanton, the leading authority in the country on the history of road signs, says that these began to appear in the 1860-70 period and were initially sponsored by the National Equine Defence League. It is not known if a notice of this type was ever deployed at the foot of the Lickey.
Whilst most signs referred to the bearing rein, some used the term hame rein. Unlike a bearing rein, a hame rein was not intended to restrain a skittish horse. An official of the Heavy Horse Association advises this type of rein was used mainly on farms to prevent the horse from stopping to graze when it should be concentrating on working. Nonetheless, failure to slacken the rein when ascending a hill had the same effect, ie. much distress to the horse.
One suspects the lives of draught and pack horses in days gone by must have only rarely risen above the level of wretchedness. But as bad as the foregoing tribulations must have been, there was the added misery of horses having to cope with appalling conditions under-hoof, especially in the winter and this was the case all over the country. Writing in 1586 William Harrison said: Now to speake generallie of our common high waies through the English part of the Ile, you shall vnderstand that in the claie or cledgie soile they are often veerie deepe and troublesome in the winter halfe.
So deep and troublesome in fact that it was not unknown for men and horses to drown in sloughs they were unable to circumnavigate and there were spells when horses and drivers would be eternally plastered in mud. But even in dry weather the surfaces of tracks and highways could deliver agony especially on hills where ruts could cause jarring obstruction to the progress of draught vehicles while loose gravel made it difficult for hooves to grip. It is doubtful the passage here would have risen above the norm and we might safely presume “The Lickey” would have been a name to spell foreboding for travellers and no small amount of toil for their horses….