Spirit Horse Festival It was a horse with ‘attitude’ that set the founder of New Zealand’s International Spirit Horse Festival, Rosemary Wyndham-Jones, on her journey towards a deeper, and more natural understanding of horses, writes CANDIDA BAKER.
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loved horses from an early age but we lived in London, so they were not readily available,” says Rosemary Wyndham-Jones, recalling days when she would trek to a suburban riding school to muck out stables, just to get her horse hit.
and 200 participants to the inaugural Spirit Horse Festival in 2016, but it may never have happened, if it wasn’t for one particular horse, Jodie. “I bred her in 1990 and by the time she was nine-years-old she
It would be hard to imagine a more different location – and way of being with horses – than where she is based now, at the Dune Lakes Lodge Retreat and Horse Inspired Learning Centre, in South Head near Woodhill Forest, not far from Auckland. Photographs of her herd galloping together on the beach, or stretched out in the early morning sun in their pasture, speak of an enviable freedom for the horse. It’s this dream of freedom that attracted international speakers
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HORSEVIBES MAGAZINE - DECEMBER 2018
had actually almost killed me several times. What I learned from Jodie, in a way made all of this possible,” Rosemary says. “She passed four years ago, but I still have Mary, her mother, who is 32 this year.” It occurs to me that this means she took Mary and Jodie from the UK to New Zealand when she moved in 2003. ”Of course,” she says, matter-of-factly. “They’re my family.” As a young woman Rosemary first moved from London to the Isle of Wight, where, along with working in various different careers to keep her horse-habit afloat, she got her first horse at 27, competing in eventing, show jumping and dressage. “I think the first inkling that I might not be ‘conventional’ is that I simply couldn’t keep my horse in a stable, which is what everyone else did,” she says. “I leased graz-
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