To be sure, farrier, Frank Cobham has heard of the experiments with mechanically driven vehicles in England and continental Europe. To be sure, it’s a good idea of the Frenchman Nicolas Cugnot that a “car” can move all by itself without horses, but a sensible man like him knows of course that this is all nonsense. And anyway, you need roads without potholes and cart tracks, and there aren’t any of them!

For the time being police officer William Enfield has a Quarter Horse stabled behind his house for times when the public order needs him in a hurry. And of course the fire carts and water pumps of fire officer George Bigging are pulled by English thoroughbreds, the fastest horses around.  Linda, the beautiful daughter of John and Annabel Ripley, with whom the photographer Francis Harrow has fallen in love, loves riding into the hills on her Exmoor Pony where she gallops for hours to get a breath of fresh air. But it goes without saying that Frank Cobham gets most of his work from the work horses, which regularly lose the irons from under their hoofs.

When Pat Hackney’s Clydesdales pull the big cart up the snowy hills to uproot Christmas trees for his Pat's X-mas Trees Shop, afterwards, Frank often has to renew all the horseshoes. When his fellow smith Christopher Lambert has heavy loads to transport, which he often has, he fixes the smith’s cart to the two heavy Suffolk Punches, which truly can move anything, but are always in need of new horseshoes. Frank himself has a real but unshod Anglo Arab in the stable. For those moments when he wants to throw everything aside…