Where are the Sleddale Mare Lines?
/For the past two falls, our friends Paula and Torrin have visited Willowtrail Farm to go on pony rides with my ponies and me. This winter, Paula asked about a spring ride. I said I was interested, but I was uncertain which pony I would have available. In the past, Willowtrail Wild Rose has been my primary mount. She and Torrin were well acquainted from having ‘roomed together’ when I owned them both, so those were companionable rides from many perspectives. But Rose is one of my broodmares, and I had planned to breed her this year. While Rose seems to prefer working to being a mom, I have asked her to be a mom in the past because she is out of a Fell Pony line that I have considered rare. The last Sleddale pony was born in Cumbria in 2004. Mr. Harrison, the last member of his family to breed Fell Ponies, passed away in 2013. Rose’s mother was my first Fell Pony, Sleddale Rose Beauty.
Paula and Torrin ahead of Rose and me just passing Milepost 8 on the Mickelson Trail in October 2023.
It occurred to me that I was making an assumption that Sleddale lines are rare based on just the anecdotal information above, so I decided I should be a little more rigorous to help my decision-making about Rose. When I interviewed Mr. Harrison in 2011 for an article in the Fell Pony Society of North America magazine about long-time breeders, he told me the ponies he was most proud of breeding were the Sleddale Rose and Sleddale Beauty lines. Sleddale Rose X was the supreme champion at the 1979 Fell Pony Society breed show, with a Sleddale stallion and mare winning the progeny classes at the same show. (The article I interviewed Mr. Harrison for is a chapter in the new book The Fell Pony’s Enduring Stewards, available internationally by clicking here.)
Sleddale Rose Beauty with me and her daughter Willowtrail Wild Rose.
To investigate the ‘rareness’ of the Sleddale Rose and Beauty lines, I used my Fell Pony pedigree database. Use of pedigrees comes with the usual caveats about Fell Pony pedigree research:
The data is only as accurate as the information breeders provide. I have found errors over the years and corrected them when I have sufficient information.
Some entry errors occasionally occur in the stud books of the Fell Pony Society. I have informed the Society of these errors, and they have corrected them in their database, as have I in my database.
Anecdotal evidence says that pedigrees have been put on some ponies who would otherwise have been unregisterable as purebred Fells. Therefore, any descendants of those ponies have pedigrees that are inaccurate. Not everyone knows which ponies these are, so it’s important to remember that there’s more to selecting a pony for any use than just the piece of paper with their name on it.
We are lucky to have a registry, The Fell Pony Society, that tracks pedigrees so that we can do research like I do to make decisions informed by the pedigrees we have.
I extracted from my Fell Pony pedigree database all the foals registered as born in 2017 and 2018 and descended from Sleddale Rose (registration number 8285) and Sleddale Beauty (registration number 8286). I chose 2017 and 2018 because they are the most recent years for which I have worldwide data in my database. In my various research projects, I have found those years to be a good proxy for the entire modern breeding population of Fell Ponies.
Sleddale Rose and Sleddale Beauty are half-sisters on their dam’s side, Sleddale Daisy II. Rose was by Swinburn Boy. Beauty was by Storm Boy. Beauty was one of five mares born in 1940 that has contributed to our modern population of Fell Ponies. (1) Rose was one of six mares born in 1941 that has contributed to our modern population of Fell Ponies. (2)
Sleddale Rose is behind every foal born in 2017 and 2018 except one pony; there were 690 foals born in those two years. Beauty is behind 97.8% of the foals born in those years based on pedigree data. Certainly from this high level pedigree data, Sleddale lines don’t seem particularly rare. But I also knew that some very popular stallions - Lunesdale Jerry being one example - have these mares behind them. In Jerry’s case, Sleddale Beauty is on his pedigree. Jerry is behind greater than 95% of the foals in the foal crops I am studying.
In 2019, Clare Winton, PhD, published an article on the genetic diversity of British native ponies. In it she said, “Ancestral maternal diversity was maintained by most populations, particularly the Fells and Welsh ponies, which exhibited rare and ancient lineages…. The Fell ponies face the challenge of reducing the proportion of FIS carriers in the population, but great care must be taken to ensure unique ancestral maternal haplotypes are not lost in the process.” (3) Winton’s findings of important ancestral maternal diversity in the Fell Pony, and the importance of conserving it, encouraged me to focus on the Sleddale mare lines.
Willowtrail Wild Rose and Willowtrail Henry in 2019
My next step was to find the unique mares that produced foals in 2017 and 2018 (I took out the second instance of mares who had foals in both 2017 and 2018). These steps left me with 530 unique mare lines to investigate. In the end, only 48 of those mares (9.1%) were descended through their female line from either Sleddale Rose or Sleddale Beauty (click here to see the list). Here was the first confirmation that my Rose might be important genetically to the Fell Pony breed.
My next step was to look at how much fan out there is in this population of 48 from the original two mares. Not much in the first generation it turns out! Sleddale Beauty had one daughter who contributed to the 48, Sleddale Beauty II. Sleddale Rose had two daughters who contributed to the 48, Sleddale Rose III and Sleddale Rose IV. Of the 48, 19 are descended from Beauty II, 16 are descended from Rose III, and 13 are descended from Rose IV. My Rose is descended from Rose IV, who has the fewest descendants of these three first generation descendants of Mr. Harrison’s revered mares. Once again, my Rose looks interesting genetically within the context of the worldwide Fell Pony breeding population.
The family tree below shows how the mare lines descend from Mr. Harrison’s two favorites towards today’s pony population. The numbers behind each pony name indicate the number of dams descended from her that produced in the 2017-18 foal crops. For instance, Sleddale Rose III has 16 unique female descendants that had foals in the combined 2017/2018 foal crops. Rose III’s daughter Sleddale Rosette has six, and Rosette’s daughter Sleddale Rosette II has the same 6. Rosette II had three daughters that had two lines each: Sleddale Rosette VII, Sleddale Rosette XIV, and Sleddale Rosette VIII. The tree in most cases does not go all the way to the mares of the 2017-18 foal crops because that would have gotten TOO complicated! The ponies shown in red are resident in North America; some are deceased. In the Rosette lines, for instance, you see only one pony in North America: Lunesdale Shamrock. Her daughter Littletree Babysham had a foal in 2017. Littletree Babysham’s daughter Dreamhayven Decadence is also actively being bred though she had no foals in 2017 or 2018.
Regarding my Rose’s importance genetically, it is interesting to see that five of the 13 descendants from Sleddale Rose IV are in North America. Rose isn’t that interesting, then, in the context of North America. It can be argued, however, that any representative of these lines is important. For perspective on the prospective importance of all Sleddale mare line descendants, of the Sleddale line dams contributing to the 2017/18 foal crop, 5 of the 48 have only had colts. So that means only 43 of the 48 have contributed to keeping these Sleddale mare lines going.
For an additional perspective, there were 26 Sleddale descent filly foals born in 2017/18. Three of those fillies are already deceased. Another 18 have not been bred yet, and two more have only had colts. So only 3 of 26 or 11% of the 2017/18 Sleddale-line fillies have contributed to keeping the lines going so far, not very many at all. The good news is that I know of at least more that is in an active breeding program now.
Here are some other interesting observations about the family tree:
A few breeders have multiple descendants of Mr. Harrison’s revered mares. These include the prefixes Brackenbank, Carrock, Deepghyll, Lunesdale, and Clifford in the UK and Laurelhighland and Dreamhayven on this side of the pond.
Two of the 26 fillies in the 2017/18 foal crops have produced foals for the Lammerside stud, including three fillies, keeping those lines going.
The North American population, at this point, has representatives of all five of the third-generation descendants of Mr. Harrison’s favorite mares except one: Sleddale Beauty VI. That line is currently being kept going by the Brooksan stud in the UK.
I only identified one Sleddale mare line descendant in The Netherlands. Karla van de Veenhoeve is descended from the Sleddale Dainty XI line, one of only two of the 48 Sleddale line mares in that branch of the tree.
Three mares behind other female lines of Fell Ponies came up repeatedly in my research and are much more numerous:
Lady of Heltondale, an unregistered fell mare is behind a lot of mare lines, including some found at the Wellbrow, Rackwood, Greenholme, Heltondale, and Drybarrows studs.
Sarah of Lownthwaite is behind not just Lownthwaite but also Heltondale lines.
Dinah by Hardendale Model is behind Heltondale (Dot of Keld Head) and Bybeck lines and perhaps others.
Willowtrail Wild Rose and Willowtrail Lettie in 2022. Courtesy Paula Guenther.
When I go out to see my Rose shortly, I will look at her with increased understanding. I haven’t yet made up my mind about whether to breed her or have her available for riding (she has made it clear she doesn’t wish to do both at the same time). I also don’t know how I will come to my final decision. It is entirely likely, of course, that Rose will express her opinion on the subject, either by choosing to conceive or not if I do decide to try to breed her. At least I now have more information to help guide my decision-making process and hers!
My pedigree database contains ponies foaled before 1993 only if they contributed to the modern population (ponies foaled from 1993 to 2023). A hand count of the entries for 1940 found only five mares including Sleddale Beauty.
Same as #1 above except in 1941 a hand count of my database found six mares foaled in 1941, including Sleddale Rose.
Winton, Clare, et al. “Genetic diversity within and between British and Irish breeds: The maternal and paternal history of native ponies,” Ecology and Evolution, November 2019, p. 1352, 1365.
