‘The towpath has become totally unusable for a horse. I get people shouting things like ‘That’s really cruel, what are you doing to those horses?’ But they don’t understand — it’s an easy pull for a horse. I could pull that boat, it’s on water so it’s not heavy.’

Ms Roberts claims that pulling a boat is much easier for a horse than someone riding them. She said while people getting impatient waiting for the animals to pass is nothing new, confrontations had become worse in recent years with one man even attempting to push her horse out the way.

‘He got both hands on the horse and tried to push him. He ended up with his earphones in the hedge and threatening to report us.

‘If you get stressed the horses get stressed.

‘I love my horses to bits and if anybody accuses me of being cruel to them it really hurts.

‘There comes a time when you think you just can’t do it anymore.’

A horse pulling a barge is an extremely efficient form of transport.


At a steady walking speed a horse can move approximately fifty times as much weight in a boat as it could with a cart on old fashioned roads, possibly a hundred times its own body weight. The load moves with minimal friction whilst the strength of the animal is linked directly to the load with little wasted energy and it was this efficiency equation that inspired the development of the canal system in the eighteenth century. It was also this same old-fashioned horsepower that kept it going profitably for a century and a half thereafter.

Hi

Simple physics.

It may well be 15 tons on dry land, it is not in water.