42 
Welsh Ponies and Cobs. 
quarries regularly. His sire was a forgotten colliei, and his 
dam a Welsh cob, presumably of the Old Trotting Comet 
and Cardigan breed. Judiciously mated this old horse might 
have turned out a valuable asset to Welsh cob fame, and siied 
ci famous race 
" ■ Old Blind Flyer , the sire of Old Trotting Comet (who in turn 
was the sire of Old Welsh Flyer ) seems, from the description 
handed down of him, to have been a horse of the same type as 
Stonecracker. The owner of Old Flyer is described rather 
enigmatically in the pedigree as Schon Glanmor Clarach, which 
freely translated reads, “John who lived by the sea in the 
Valley of Clarach.” 
The Welsh Cob op the Victorian Era. 
The world generally has adopted the habit of denoting 
styles, whether of architecture, furniture, or personal orna- 
ments and dress, by the name of kings and queens. If we 
carry this principle into our earliest accounts of Welsh cobs 
and call them the Victorian cobs of Wales, we shall be working 
on chronological lines, as it is to the early days of Queen 
Victoria’s reign that their origin is traced, and it was during 
her long reign that they obtained their notoriety. 
In an attempt to trace the origin of the Welsh cob, the 
Hackney, or any similar type, it must be remembered that 
none of these breeds are, in the true sense of the word, pure. 
There can be no doubt that the so-called roadsters, nags, or 
cobs, were more or less admixtures of varieties. There comes 
a day in the history of all breeds, when the blend, after being 
persevered with, becomes a type, to which is given a distinc- 
tive title. 
In this way the Welsh cob, having been inbred for some 
generations, became known universally as the Welsh trotting 
cob. The details of its origin are fully set out in the pages of 
the Welsh stud books. On referring to them it will be seen 
that in the 130 pedigrees given in the Welsh Cob Society’s 
earlier volumes, there are some 126 absolutely indigenous 
Welsh cob sires that have left their mark as the sires of this 
particular type of animal. Many of these were descended 
from Old Trotting Comet. His stock and the stock of Old 
Welsh Flyer , his illustrious son, reinforced and improved by 
the infusion of Arab blood through the redoubtable Cymro 
Llwyd , became so notorious that most of their progeny were 
kept for stud purposes, justifying Herbert Spencer’s formula, 
that each step in their evolution showed greater heterogeneity, 
greater coherence, and greater definiteness than the stage 
that preceded it. 
