Glow Means Slow

Many of you will have heard of the campaign GLOW MEANS SLOW currently running to help with educating motorists about the safe way to pass a horse while out on the roads.It also has a little added extra & helps riders to understand why it is sort important to be seen, both on & off the road.

We asked Sarah Johnson from the campaign to tell us a little bit more about it!

Let's start at the beginning...

What is Glow Means Slow?

Qualifying for the Northern Regional Championships!

As most of you know from last week's competition report, we're members of the Newcastle riding club, and have been for a little over a year. It's a club that I used to be a member of with Buddy five or so years ago too.

Anyway, I put Louie & I forward for the summer area 2 qualifiers, very last minute on the entries closing date! There were also three other members interested, so we created a team and looked forward to the competition. The qualifiers were being held at Richmond Equestrian Centre, North Yorkshire, on Saturday 24th June. The day is run by volunteers from all the clubs in area 2 and they did a really great job, helping to point people in the right direction, rounding up from the warm up arenas and getting people out into the main arenas and into the correct test arena... If we didn't have volunteers in this sport, nothing would run, so it's always important to appreciate them.

Blogger's Corner: Increasing Site Engagement

Are you interested in trying to get your blog visitors to read multiple posts once they are on your site? If not, you should be - you made all that effort to get them there so it's good to get them to see as much of your content as possible...

However, it is important to identify what content they want to see through presenting content options to them that are related to what made them click through to your blog in the first place.

Fun in the Sun

This weekend, we headed out to Todburn Equestrian Centre to enjoy some riding club dressage and combined training. After our dressage disaster at Benridge at the end of May, our sole aim was to go & have an enjoyable day, with a less dramatic test from both Louie & I!!

Mission accomplished!!

Welcome to the World of Equestrian Blogging

Many of you reading this will already be bloggers in some guise - you may not even realise you are!

Regular & long standing readers will know why I started my equestrian blog, but in a nutshell, it was to create a space to look back at competition reports to see our improvements as we progressed across the seasons & throughout the winter.

Team Tunnah Eventing launched on 9th October 2012. I had my digital marketing knowledge & experience in my back pocket, but really blogging back then was nowhere near as popular as it is today, especially in our equestrian niche. I've just taken a few minutes to read back through my first ever post - I thought I would be severely shocked & a tad embarrassed. I'm not at all.

My equestrian blog has always truly been in my own personality, my own style and about me & my horse. This is one thing that looking back, I'm quite proud that I have maintained throughout. My visitors like my posts & I've had good feedback on my style from industry experts.

Summer Coolers

Image credit: Hannah Russell

Every month I post for Totally Horse & Pony magazine, usually covering Fashion & Style. I've now completed three posts.

• Spring Greens, Gorgeous Greys... & A Hint of Pink in Between
  Looking a colourful spring items for you & your horse to brighten your day & blow away those winter cobwebs!
• Too Hot to Trot
  What to wear (& what not to wear) when visiting Badminton horse trials at the start of May. The post also looked into what should be popular in the all important & eagerly anticipated trot-up outfits!
• Summer Cooler Ideas for You and Your Horse!
  Our latest post, inspire by a lovely long burst of summer weather... Sadly, the warmer temperatures seemed to disappear, and be exchanged for rain, no sooner had the post gone live...

Bramham Horse Trials 2017

We've just come back from enjoying another fantastic weekend at Bramham horse trials... OK, so we only go to Friday's dressage & Saturday's cross country, but coming from around the Bramham area, I make sure we always make a weekend of the trip away. Take a read through our 2016 Bramham Horse Trials post to see what we thought last year too!

Blogger's Corner: Picking Your Social Media Platform

Our latest Blogger's Corner top tip comes from Ruby Butchers, author of Equipepper. Equipepper started out as a blog documenting the journey of retraining her ex-racehorse, Highland Rain. In November 2016, Ruby was named as Haynet's Rising Star in the equestrian blog awards.

Ruby has chosen to cover social media platforms & how we should go about choosing what platforms our blogs should be present on.

What Social Media platforms should you use for blogging?

Belsay Horse Trials

This weekend, we headed along to one of our local horse trial events, Belsay horse trials in Northumberland. Whether to spectate, or back when we competed, it is our favourite horse trials to go to in the county. It has always been super organised and tries hard to have something for everyone making it a great family day out.

The horse trials are set in the grounds of the Belsay estate, boasting a spectacular yet quaint castle, hall and beautiful gardens, and is just located north-west of Newcastle on the A696. It has good road access whether your in a big, bulky horsebox or heading along in your car.

Belsay horse trials run British Eventing classes from BE90 up to Intermediate, and this year included U18's, U21's as well as a Novice Region Final.

So why do we love this local event so much?

May Round Up

Jumping. That’s what this month has been all about! Our last showjumping lesson feels like a lifetime ago, WAY back on 28th April, where we saw Louie show some real green mistakes - mistakes that we thought were behind him and took us by surprise.

We decided to build his confidence back up, starting with loose jumping him over various things (water trays, fillers, planks, ladders…) which highlighted that actually he didn’t seem to have a lot of his own confidence. I’m not really sure what’s caused the loss of confidence – perhaps his recent over-eagerness, but there’s certainly been no immediate trigger.

So, the task this month was to make jumping anything the norm for Louie, while still also working on our rhythm.