Twenty mares and one stallion were the whole of the breed

Eriskay is a small island in the Outer Hebrides, a few miles of machair and peat between South Uist and Barra, reachable today by a causeway that did not exist until 2001. For most of its history it was reachable only by boat, which is the single fact that explains almost everything else in this piece.

Until the mid-19th century, ponies of a recognisably similar type worked crofts across the whole of the Western Isles — carrying peat and seaweed in creels on their backs, pulling carts and harrows, taking children along the shore to school. They were not a breed in the modern sense so much as a type: small, hardy, surefooted animals bred for what the work and the weather demanded, with no studbook and no club behind them.

What "improvement" nearly finished

The type began disappearing everywhere it was easy to reach. Two pressures did the work. The first was straightforwardly economic: as roads, motor transport and larger farm machinery spread through the islands, a pony built to carry a creel on its back had less and less to do. The second was a matter of fashion as much as function — a preference, encouraged by stallion-improvement schemes of the period, for bigger animals. Norwegian Fjord, Arab and Clydesdale stallions were put to native island mares to raise their size and reshape their type, which is a perfectly common thing to do to a working population and which, done consistently enough, stops being improvement and starts being replacement.

Eriskay was where that replacement mostly failed to happen, and it failed for a reason that had nothing to do with anyone trying to save a breed. The island was harder and more expensive to reach than its neighbours, which made it harder and more expensive to ship improvement stallions to. The ponies that were already there stayed largely as they were, by accident of geography rather than by design.

Geography bought the type time. It did not stop its numbers falling. Mechanisation reached Eriskay eventually too, and by the early 1970s the native ponies surviving there are generally put at around twenty mares and a single stallion. That is not a low point on a chart. It is close to the minimum number at which a population can be said to still exist as a breeding entity at all.

The rescue was slow, local, and still ongoing

What happened next is a small story about a small number of people rather than any institution. In the early 1970s a group on and off the island began deliberately keeping and breeding the surviving ponies, rather than letting the last of them be absorbed into crossbred island stock or sold on and dispersed. Breeding groups were established across the British Isles through the following decades, slowly widening the base beyond the one island where the type had hung on.

The numbers today reflect that patient, unglamorous work rather than any single turning point: the Eriskay Pony Society estimates roughly 420 ponies worldwide, bred now by owners the length and breadth of Britain rather than on Eriskay alone. That is a genuine recovery, more than twenty times the population of fifty years ago, and it is worth stating plainly rather than filing under a caveat.

The caveat has to be stated too, though, because the headline number is doing less work than it looks like it is. Of those 420 animals, fewer than 300 are breeding mares — the figure a breed's future is actually built from — and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust still classifies the Eriskay as Critically Endangered and a Priority breed on its watchlist, the most urgent category the Trust keeps. We have written before about why a headline population figure and a breed's genetic room to manoeuvre are not the same number — see what an effective population size actually tells you — and the Eriskay is close to a textbook case of the gap between the two. Four hundred and twenty is a real recovery from twenty-one. It is also, on its own, nowhere near enough to call the job finished.

A type the mainland never got to reshape

One consequence of Eriskay's isolation is now treated as the breed's most valuable asset rather than an accident worth apologising for. Genetic research carried out with the Eriskay Pony Society's cooperation has found the breed to be genetically distinct and notably old, and unrelated to the Highland pony — the mainland breed it is most often assumed to be a relative of, on the reasonable but mistaken grounds that both are small, hardy and Scottish. The Eriskay is its own thing, shaped by a few centuries of island use and almost nothing else, which is precisely what the improvement schemes of the 19th and 20th centuries were in the process of breeding out of every pony population that could be reached by boat.

The animal that isolation preserved is a neat, strong, surprisingly weatherproof pony standing 12 to 13.2 hands, with a dense double coat that lets it winter outdoors in conditions that would leave a finer-coated breed struggling. Almost all are grey as adults — foals are commonly born black or bay and grey out over their first few years, the same pattern seen in several other old grey breeds — with fine legs, neat feet and only the lightest feathering at the fetlock. For an animal that size it is remarkably strong, traditionally rated able to carry a grown adult despite standing little taller than a child.

None of that working toughness has gone to waste now that creels and cart work are gone. Eriskays are kept today as family and Pony Club ponies, competing across dressage, eventing, show jumping and driving, and a number work specifically as therapy ponies — including with Riding for the Disabled and in programmes supporting people managing PTSD. A pony bred for patience under an uncertain load on an unforgiving island, it turns out, transfers reasonably well to patience under a nervous first-time rider.

What recovery actually requires, going forward

We wrote recently about why a small population doesn't get to breed its problems away simply by having more litters — see why rare breeds don't breed the carriers out — and the logic holds here in reverse. A breed does not get to call itself safe simply by having more animals than it used to. Three hundred breeding mares sounds substantial next to twenty. It is still a number small enough that a handful of popular stallions, used carelessly, could narrow the breed's genetic base again within a generation or two, the same mechanism we set out in what popularity costs a breed.

What the Eriskay Pony Society is doing about that is, by its own account, the same work the rescue effort has always done: keeping records, spreading breeding stock geographically rather than concentrating it, and working with the RBST on the long, deliberate business of using more stallions on more mares rather than fewer stallions on more of them. It is not dramatic work, and it does not produce a single moment anyone could point to and call the breed saved. It produces, slowly, a pony that is a little less close to the twenty mares it was built back up from.

If you breed, own or represent a society for a Priority or Critically Endangered breed and would rather we understood your stud book from you than reconstructed it from published figures, the address is info@genovaq.co.uk.

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Sources

• The Eriskay Pony — Eriskay Pony Society
• Catherine Austen, "Rare Scottish pony breed is making a comeback", Horse & Hound
• Equine breeds — RBST Watchlist, Rare Breeds Survival Trust

— Rene