504 
Waste Hill Lands : 
race, on Hartford Bridge Flat, for a considerable sum, 3 miles 
in 8 minutes, 9 being the time allowed her ; even betting. 
Both times carrying a feather." This is, I think, a fair sample 
of what Forest ponies can do when a little dash of extra blood 
is thrown in. 
I must now turn to the Welsh, of which breed I certainly 
have had less experience, though one of my earliest mounts was 
on a chestnut cob reputed to be from Wales, who was as good 
and clever a hunter for his inches as man ever crossed, and as 
hard as a stem of old heather from his native hills. On him an 
uncle of mine hunted and ran down, with the aid of an old 
harrier bitch that had just left her whelps, an outlying buck in 
August 1839, after a capital run, and many is the good chase 
that the old chestnut went gallantly through, though, if my 
recollection serves me rightly, he was more a cob than a pony, 
and must have been not less than 14 hands in height. In 
fact, my idea of the Welsh breed is that they are coarser and 
show less blood than the Exmoor, and are as a rule bordering 
more on the cob stamp. No doubt they are very hardy, and 
many of them are capital roadsters, and can get along in the 
trot at a most astonishing pace. I find it stated in a book en- 
titled ' Wynnstay and the Wynns,' by the author of the ' Gossip- 
ing Guide to Wales,' published at Oswestry in 1876 by Woodall 
and Venables, that the goodness of the Welsh ponies, as well 
as the designation of Merlyns by which they are known, is 
to be accounted for as follows : " Sometime about the reign of 
Queen Anne, we are told, there was introduced into Wales a 
Galloway called Merlin, who became the sire of a celebrated 
stock of Welsh ponies. Up to that period the breed was 
degenerating, and the only name the Welshman had to describe 
his little mountain steed was Ceffyl Bach. And thus it is said an 
ancestor of Sir Watkin Williams F. Wynn introduced at the 
same time a new race of ponies to the mountains and a new 
word to the vocabulary of Wales." Be that as it may, they are 
certainly known as Merlyns or Merlins. Some of the ^ost 
celebrated Welsh ponies were a few years ago bred just on the 
outskirts of Radnor Forest, but I have been told that from en- 
closures and other causes they have become very scarce there of 
late years. 
Crossing the Solway Firth into the counties of Wigton and 
Kirkcudbright, we come to what was until nearly the middle of 
the nineteenth century another famous pony-breeding country. 
They, however, were ponies of somewhat larger size than most 
of those I have been discussing, though still not up to the 
standard of horses ; and so celebrated were they for hardihood 
and endurance, that even to the present day any animal from 14*1 
