Pensioner sets off on 600-mile pony trek with pet dog in saddlebag
Jane Dotchin, 80, has been making the unusual journey from Northumberland to the Highlands since 1972. (Story from STV News)
An 80-year-old woman who wears an eyepatch is on an annual trek with her pony from England to the Highlands – on a seven-week adventure which began in 1972.
Jane Dotchin packs her saddlebags onto her trusty pony’s back every year, and heads to the hills from her home near Hexham, Northumberland, on an epic 600-mile trek to Inverness, covering between 15 and 20 miles a day.
She set off on August 31 with her steed, Diamond, aged 13, and her disabled Jack Russell named Dinky for company, from the off-grid smallholding where she lives.
She carries everything she needs including her tent, food and just a few belongings – and despite wearing an eyepatch is determined to continue as long as she can.
Ms Dotchin said: “My mother would look after my other ponies but she wasn’t that keen on looking after my Halfinger stallion, so I rode him down to Somerset to see a friend, which is about 300 miles.
“It was a bit of a hard slog, but it was good.”
After that initial journey, she caught the taste for the open road and travelled to visit friends near Fort Augustus, near Loch Ness, every autumn since.
The journey takes around seven weeks depending on weather and Ms Dotchin tries to stop off to see people she has met over the years.
She said: “I refuse to go slogging on through pouring wet rain.
“There are a few different routes I can take depending on the weather.
“I don’t want to go over hilltops in foul weather, but I work it out on the way.
“I don’t bother with maps, I just keep to the routes I know.
“It is nice to go and see [people] again – I ring them up in the morning to say I’m going to be there in the evening.
“I don’t warn them too far in advance, because if the weather suddenly changes or I decide to stop early then they can be left wondering where I’ve got to.”
Disabled Jack Russell Dinky, who has deformed front legs, travels in a saddle bag.
Ms Dotchin said: “She manages fine, when there is a nice grassy track she gets out and has a run, but she doesn’t like stoney ground but she is a nice hot water bottle for me in the tent.”
She said: “I asked for something good and solid in my old age and he got me a cob from Ireland. I struggle to get on her half the time, but otherwise I manage fine.”
Her diet consists of porridge oats, oatcakes and cheese which is bought at local shops.
She prefers to make porridge with milk, but water will suffice.
Ms Dotchin added: “You can always boil it from a stream.”
Her bathroom habits are equally DIY, and she said: “I dig a hole.”
Ms Dotchin is devastated by the littering she has seen over the years and said Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, is somewhere she finds “shameful” due to the amount of rubbish.
She said: “It’s appalling, in particular single used barbecues which are left lying all over the place.
“Cumbernauld is the fly-tipping capital of Britain.
“There are some lovely people there who let me camp, but some of it is so disgusting and shameful.”
Campervans on single track roads have also become a more persistent problem.
She said: “Drivers just didn’t seem to know how wide they were, I was forever just about getting swept off the roads by them.”
The right to roam has helped with countryside access, but she said: “There are still some locked gates or little side gates that you can’t get a horse with packs on through.”
For emergencies she carries an old mobile phone as the battery lasts six weeks.
Ms Dotchin said: “I keep it switched off and just ring out to ring up landowners to get gates unlocked or to warn people when I’m coming but sometimes the trouble is getting a signal.”
During the foot and mouth crisis in 2001 she went on bicycle instead.
She said: “I covered many more miles with the dog in a pannier but it was not the same, I missed my horse.”
In recognition of her independent spirit, and many years of long distance trekking, she received The British Horse Society lifetime achievement award last year, which she said was “a bit of a surprise.”
During her travels she witnesses rutting deer and stags fighting in the autumn, and foxes.
She said: “There is always something interesting happening and there is never a dull moment.
The most fascinating thing about the Street Sharks TV series is that, for a decade or more, the most prolific contributor to the Street Sharks wikipedia page was absolutely making everything up, including phony episode summaries and fraudulent, nonexistent characters like Roxie the Girl Street Shark (pink, naturally), as well as the idea Henry Winkler (the Fonz) was a guest star voice actor on several episodes.
Whether because of the lack of real interest in this topic, and the fact that nobody really remembers this show all that well, these facts went absolutely unchallenged, and were even reprinted in official sources, to the point that fans on forums regularly wonder why Roxie never got a toy, or even added Street Sharks to Henry Winkler’s official credits. One of the weirdest parts of this is that actual Street Sharks voice actor Andrew Rannellls once told a story at a convention about meeting Henry Winkler when a fan asked him, which…to be clear…absolutely never happened. Rannells is probably not even lying, people just said this authoritatively over and over, to the point he may even actually remember it, due to the mutability and vulnerability to suggestion of memory. One of my most controversial takes is that, the stats on memory for non-trained observers are so shockingly low, that I don’t believe eyewitness testimony should be accepted as evidence in most serious criminal cases.
The man responsible for this has since claimed that he was trying a “social experiment” about the “immutable nature of facts on the internet” but anyone who remembers the 2000s era internet probably knows that’s just blather a dumb teenager making mischief for the hell of it says when caught.
during the Victorian occultism movement I would have been the guy who giggled all the way through seances
Arthur Conan Doyle subtly, but very firmly kicking you under the table.
man was 6’1” and built like a brick shithouse if he looked at me sideways I’d collapse like an aluminum can
Mans was WHAT
here’s a picture of him standing next to Harry Houdini, who was 5’6”
This is actually really interesting in the context of average height.
In the Victorian era, average height for Englishmen was 5'6" with a range of 5'3" - 5'9". Anyone outside of this range was considered unusually tall or short.
So mans WAS built like a brick shithouse.
And Harry Houdini was the guy who was giggling all the way through the seance.
Her name’s Cynthia Rothrock and you’d better put some respect on it!
she’s part of the old guard of Hong Kong kung fu films where you had to be an honest to god martial artist to play the role correctly. when she started acting in American movies they had to keep telling her to not hit so hard lmao
love watching her sword very carefully and gracefully missing him
i like the part where the second woman just runs in and starts whaling on the dude like yes that’s exactly what happens in real life too
The movie is “The Magic Crystal” (1986) if anyone like me saw this and was immediately interested!
In the town where I grew up, there was a large statue in one of the parks, of a famous historical white colonizer. I’m not going to say who specifically, suffice it to say that it was someone who wasn’t worth memorializing for their deeds. And as you can imagine, this statue was a frequent target of vandalism, with paint or toilet paper or eggs on multiple occasions. Now, the local council was generally pretty lax when it came to repairing potholes or other public damage in the town, but every time, 24 hours after this particular statue was hit, the same person would always appear in a Hi-Vis vest, hat, mask and sunglasses, carrying a bucket of water, and wash it clean. They would do it as quickly as possible, but always made sure the face and the name carved at the bottom were generously scrubbed. This only encouraged people to do it again, and so it became a vicious cycle.
Within a year, the statue had sustained so much damage that it was unrecognizable and the lettering unreadable, so eventually the council came and took it down. Also apparently, the person in the Hi-Vis vest didn’t even work for the council. They were supposedly just some ‘good samaritan’ who cleaned it, often before the council even discovered it needed cleaning, so they just let them do it and ignored the problem. They didn’t bother putting the statue up again.
Much later, we found out that the anonymous 'samaritan’ had been deliberately washing the statue with a bucket of saltwater, which had dramatically corroded it, causing irreversible accumulative damage far worse than spray paint ever would have done. It’s even theorized that they were also often the one spray-painting it, just so that they had an excuse to come back after a day to wash it.
