The older farmers of the area still remember the times when the survival of all the farms in and around Pilsbury depended on the horse. We collected numerous memories around this subject, with the collective memories of some families reaching back three or more generations, even, in the case of the Proctors, to the days of the packhorses.
Richard Dale recalls working with horses on a farm close to Pilsbury:
It were all horses then. I worked at Sprinx for a year and Mother said to me after a year, “See if they'll give you a shilling a week more- you've worked for them for a year” So after Christmas- I'd had a week off at home
- I went back and said to Mr Riley, “Would you think I'm worth a shilling a week more?” “I can't see my way to paying you a shilling a week more," he said and so I left and worked up at a farm at Buxton Road.
Ditch Dray King.
George Mellor recounts a dramatic horse story from before the First World
War, passed on by his father:
About 1914, my father, the late Solomon Mellor, was twenty years of age.
He worked on a farm at Chelmorton, called Far Ditch. The farmer he worked for was a man named Samuel Dawson, and he kept a Shire Stallion called Ditch Dray King. It was my father’s job to travel this horse servicing mares round a big area of Derbyshire.
He had to walk this horse from Far Ditch to Hindlow Station, load him on to a train at nine o’clock on a Monday morning and travel with him in the railway truck to Ashbourne, about eighteen miles away. He then went round all the big farms in that district.
It took him from Monday till Friday to walk back from Ashbourne. He would travel about five miles a day and stay the night at certain farms, as arranged with his boss, all the way back.
He used to get back to Far Ditch on a Friday night. Then on the Saturday he used to go as far as Whaley Bridge, twelve miles in the other direction, walking beside the horse and calling at farms through Fernilee and up Long
Hill and get back home late on Saturday night.
One moonlit Saturday night about ten o’clock, my father was coming through Buxton and he felt very tired, so he pulled this stallion up the side of the wall in Sherbrook, put his cane stick handle through the ring on the bit and got on the horse’s back. This stallion had never been ridden before and he took fright and broke into a gallop. He never broke the gallop all the three miles to Chelmorton.
My father said he made the road ring with galloping on the limestone road in Bell shoes which were made specially to let people know when they were

approaching. Bell shoes are bevelled to make the horse’s feet look bigger than ordinary shoes. Dray King’s shoes were eighteen inches across.
When his feather was combed out, he could cover a yard of ground with his front foot. This gives you an idea what a monstrous horse he was. He must have been well over a ton in weight.
The night he galloped from Buxton to Far Ditch, instead of being dark brown, he was white with lather. My father put him in the loose box and wiped him down and fed him, before he went home to Chelmorton. He had the next day, being Sunday, to get over the episode, as on a Sunday he never came out of the loose box and Mr. Dawson didn’t know anything about it. He had gone to bed before my father got in the yard with the
horse.
Henry Proctor takes us further back still:
My grandfather’s grandfather
I’ve ploughed plenty ground with horses. I was only a lad when I first started ploughing. I could hardly turn plough up I was that small – about eleven or twelve years old. I helped on a neighbouring farm.
My grandfather was a farmer and a butcher. He also did horse breaking.
He was very fond of horses. He worked for nineteen and a half years for
Professor Sheldon at Brund. He was head horseman down there for quite a good number of years. He had different lads as worked for him. Professor
Sheldon bred horses and had an entire for quite a good many years. My grandfather used to go round countryside to suit other farms with it.
It was bred in my granddad a bit because his grandfather used horses to carry salt out of Cheshire to Norfolk and places – all that way. And
Moorhouse was the halfway mark. He had two or three horses, according to my grandfather and he’d have a sack type of thing for carrying salt in.
There used to be one of these sacks at Moorhouse but it was decaying by the time I saw it. It was made out of leather. Under the leather there was a padding made of straw, covered by a thick material – a sort of lining – to prevent the horse’s sweat making contact with the salt and then running into the horse’s back – it would have fetched all its hair off and made the skin raw. From my memory, they wouldn’t have held much; they’d have a job to hold more than three quarters of a hundred weight on either side.
His name was William Proctor and he was my grandfather’s grandfather.
He’d never stop, night or day. If it were summer time and good light nights, he’d keep going all the time, across these trackways. He’d come out of Cheshire, stop at Moorhouse, he’d have a day here, take three fresh horses, then take off, beyond Hartington and out past Matlock. William
Proctor first came to Moorhouse in 1743. It was a good change-over place.