Hardiness and weather sense
Often the ponies shelter in ghylls when the westerly gales bring rain, but the very worst cold and snow will come from the east. When bad weather threatens, most breeders say the ponies come down to the fell gate. They do this before the weather breaks.

Drybarrows (Askham Fell)
They were quite good weather merchants. They knew when it was going to change and they came to the lower ground. I won’t say they come right home but you would see them heading down the fell and probably the next morning we’d three or four inches of snow.
I’ve seen in winter time they’ve come home with a big ball of snow on their tails, and there’s sheep come following down afterwards, when there’s been a lot of snow. You wouldn’t have seen that if it hadn’t been for the ponies; I don’t think sheep would ever have come! I’ve seen it quite often. These last 12 or 15 years we haven’t had any winters, but before that, we had some winters… and I was there and saw what happened; a pony or two would come, and about half an hour to an hour after, a lot of sheep come and you could see them coming Indian file down the track the ponies had made.
But your older ponies quite often came and you’d probably got to go and look for the younger ones. Maybe if they’d missed the older ones coming away, they were to bring down.
They can please themselves. They’ll stand a snow storm and be hungry for two or three days; if there does come a thaw they can break away and find what they want. Rug them up and look after them like that? it’s not my opinion of a Fell pony…. I suppose it keeps them clean, but they’ll stand any storm that comes along, without being covered up.  (Chris Thompson)

If it was a real windy day, they were hard to find, they’d be down in a ghyll somewhere. And when you got to them, they were very sheltered, you could light a fag [cigarette] just about. They knew where to get in them gullies and when a wind come, they knew where to go to. (David Trotter)

David Trotter had a brown gelding which someone wanted to buy and he had noticed him grazing along Longdale Bottoms, so he made a note to go and catch him at the weekend, but when he went to look for him, he had gone. The Bottoms are on the north side of the Howgills and shortly afterwards there was snow out of the north. David did not see him there again until after the snow had melted. He’d gone over the tops to the south side into shelter before it started – four or five miles over land rising to 2,000 feet.

At the other side of the Howgills, Ted Benson’s Adamthwaite ponies would move down towards the farm:

They would go away, but they’d a habit, if it was going to come stormy, they would land home. Right down into t’corner. They would do that all year round, even in summer; if it was just going to be maybe heavy rain or a low pressure coming in, they would land home till it settled again, then we would maybe never see them for weeks. (Ted Benson)

The ponies not only know where all the sheltered places are, and indeed they will travel extraordinary distances in one day to reach them when the weather is about to change, but their instincts remain very sharp. They predict the arrival of snow with uncanny accuracy and will always arrive at the fell gate near the farmstead twenty four hours before a snowfall… “The Fell ponies know when we shall have snow.” (Bert Morland, A Lifetime in the Fells)

Like the sheep on the hills, they come down into the lower field when it’s going to be stormy. They’re so wise, the Fell ponies. (Mrs Ailie Newall)

At Windy Hall, Lownthwaite, there is a plantation of trees, and a big shed for winter shelter. In snow time the fell gate is opened, and the Lownthwaite ponies are given hay there, though not till the New Year. In frosty times, much of the surface water freezes; “the ponies won’t try to cross a stream if it’s frozen. They know if they went through and broke a leg they’d be dead.” The spring at Windy Hall doesn’t freeze, so the ponies can come in from the fell to drink, and they are also let in there to graze in March, “the hungry month”, when mares are heavy in foal but most of the natural grazing has been eaten already.

One time in their lives when young ponies are vulnerable on the fell is when they “change their teeth”. When they are shedding their milk teeth and growing their adult incisors at around three years old, they find it hard to graze close-cropped turf, and occasional youngsters may get into a poor condition before the new teeth grow up enough to meet and grip the grass.

The winter of 1947
In January 1947 an extraordinary change in weather conditions appears to have taken everyone by surprise. Reports tell that there had been an unusually mild spell which rapidly turned to a severe blizzard. Once the snow started it scarcely stopped for weeks, while constant below-freezing temperatures prevented it thawing. Hedges, fences and stone walls alike vanished and trees stood up to their waists in snow. Level stretches were six feet deep with drifts of twenty feet and more; there are tales of men, digging out ways for milk wagons to reach farms, hanging their jackets on the arms of telegraph poles while they worked, or cutting notches on the poles to record the depth of the snow. There were few mechanised snow-ploughs then, and even where farms had horsedrawn ones, the horses had a terribly hard time because they had to struggle through chest-high snow themselves to pull the plough. It was said that two million sheep died that winter and many farmers went bankrupt, though at least one of my neighbours received Ministry of Agriculture compensation payments of £3 a head. Another neighbour at Greenholme, Les Thackeray, remembers that the snow went on so long that his family ran out of basic foodstuffs and paraffin oil for the lamps and heaters – there was no mains electricity in Greenholme till the early 1960s and most households cooked on coke- or coal-fired ranges.

We had no paraffin, and no bread or flour left at the farm. Barry Airey and I set off one night, walked under the railway “creep” and made a beeline for Orton. It was bright moonlight and snow was that thick, we never saw a wall or hedge till we landed at the back of Grandma’s on Front Street. Hully’s were friends of ours and they opened up the shop for us, so we bought anything that was useful and carried it home in the moonlight. It went on for oh, six or eight weeks, and the sheep wouldn’t see a green blade of grass in all that time. Ours were in-bye, but such as Shap Lodge, theirs were on the fell and they lost a lot. But I never heard tell of what happened to the Fell ponies. Maybe Jim Thompson was the only person who had any around here at that time. (Les Thackeray)

Mrs Sylvia McCosh wrote in a FPS newsletter that Mr Jim Thompson’s 8319 Syble, a dark brown 9 year old mare, was out on Roundthwaite fell with her foal “during the terrible winter of 1947, and it was some time before her owner located the pair in an exhausted condition, but eventually they were brought safely home and recovered.” Miss Peggy Crossland bought Birkett Bank Polly that Spring and wrote in the FPS Newsletter of 1980: “it was now March and that ghastly ‘46/’47 winter was coming to an end. I rang Mr. Relph and asked if I could go to see him, and my mother, sister, and I duly went to Birkett Bank. There were still large drifts of snow about. They had been so deep the ponies had been able to walk over the walls. The losses among the sheep had been terrible.”

Pauline Robson says that her father, Jos Dargue, was living at Bow Hall in 1947. “We can remember Dad saying that how the ponies survived, was by eating seaves [rushes]. The sheep ate seaves too, but not to the same extent. On Bale Hill allotment, which was shared grazing, they nearly ate the seaves down to ground level; it took years for them to grow back.”

Birkdale [above Dufton] has the reputation of being the most isolated sheep farm in the kingdom; there is no road to it; the previous tenant used to travel on horseback when he went to do his shopping… Mr. Airey… told us that out of a flock of 700 sheep he had only 110 survivors, after the blizzard, and only 30 lambs. … Never have I seen so many dead sheep lying about in various stages of decomposition; everywhere there is the horrid, pungent smell. It may be asked: “Why don’t they bury them?” The answer is that the job is beyond the power of any one man. How could a farmer, with other jobs to do, set out over a wide area to collect and bury two or three hundred sheep? Nature in her own time will do the work of getting rid of them and soon all that will be left will be the bones. (Sir Clement Jones, 1948: A Tour In Westmorland)

In southwest England conditions were so bad that Exmoor ponies were found frozen to death.

“They had an aircraft from Chivenor to get out to them, to take out some food for the [Exmoor] ponies, when they got out to them they were all on their legs, they sort of fell into one another, he supposes they cuddled into one another for heat, and they were dead. Frozen to death. Yes, standing up.” (Cyril Wyburn, recorded in Somerset County archive).

Christine Morton says very little is recorded about ponies in the Lownthwaite farm diary for that time. The family’s main concern was for the dairy herd and getting the milk collected. “Presumably the ponies stayed at the fell and got fed with the sheep. Fell ponies did die. Old ponies and very young ponies. Four died in Knock Ore Gill. It was the in-foal mares who survived.”

Ivan Alexander reminded me about 2540 Heltondale Romer, bred by J W Rowlandson at Longbarrows, Bampton, in 1939. The stallion was dark brown, with a black mane and tail, and stood 13-2 ½ when he was measured on August 25th, 1945. “I can remember Sarge saying they’d named him Romer – and if you look at pedigrees he’s been all over; everybody used him!” He survived on the fell that winter, despite fresh snowfall every day from January to March, an undeniable tribute to the vitality of the breed. “He didn’t come in until March. Sarge said he was just like a shot crow, he just sort of survived.”

The winter of 1963
In  the winter of 1962-1963 my family were living on “mild” coastal Merseyside. School was shut, the sea was crusted with ice floes, and at Chester the River Dee froze solid from bank to bank; my mother has a photograph of me standing on the greenish ice, which was at least two feet thick. Television showed us that high villages were cut off, power lines were brought down and trains were cancelled. Farmers could not reach some of their livestock, and once again many starved to death in the constant severe frost. Again, aircraft were brought in to carry food to outlying farms. I remember a Thelwell cartoon of the time showing a kitchen with a splintered ceiling, and a couple sheltering under a table surrounded by scattered bales of hay while through the window can be seen a distant helicopter. The caption read something like “Stay where you are – there’s a ton of cattle cake still to to come.”  My mother recalls that when the thaw eventually came, the grass was pale yellow and the soil stank from being covered so long.

David Trotter remembers the house water supplies freezing underground in 1963 because of the prolonged, intense cold, but says that there was not as much snow as in 1947, when he was at school. He compared the survival of his two herds in 1963: Tebay Campbellton Victor’s herd, running on Fair Mile and Tebay Fell, came to the fell gate in Tebay and were fed with hay there during the hard weather. Heltondale Heather Lad’s herd stayed over the north side of the Howgills, along Longdale Bottoms, and never came home or had any extra feed. They were all in better condition, when the thaw came, than Victor’s herd which hung about the fell gate for hay.

Christine Morton says, “My mother says it was very cold before Christmas, and it snowed on Christmas morning. The main challenge was the wind from the east, dry and cold. Roads were unblocked only to ‘blow in’ again overnight. The ponies came home across the snowdrifts, over the fences. Johnny Walker joined the mares the same way and they all went into the middle pasture and into the wood. But five ponies died on the fell.”

The odd thing about those two notably bad winters is that you cannot see their effect when you look at the Fell Pony Stud Book. There was no dip in the number of foals registered: 35 were born in 1946; 40 in 1947; and 44 in 1948. That upward trend was similar in 1962, 1963 and 1964. Obviously the Stud Book, recording only births and not deaths, cannot tell the whole story.

Bill Potter remembers stock losses in 1947: “I think we lost 8 ponies that hard winter out on t’Howgills, but we had 2 or 3 left up at Uldale.” And again at Greenholme, in 1972:"We selt a lot and we lost a few. That winter come a right hard winter, and we lost a few. That learns you – when it hits your pocket, it learns you to cut back."