Horse_amp_amp_Hound__06_February_2018

In Bruges
As Valentine’s Day looms, Madeleine Silver visits
the romantic city of Bruges in Belgium to find out
what life is really like for those horses that take
centre stage in ‘the Venice of the North’
Pictures by hippo.be
OF all the cliché things to do on
Valentine’s Day, clambering
aboard a horse and carriage
in the Belgian city of Bruges
— “the Venice of the North” —
and settling down under a rug with a date
is up there.
But if it’s the horses you’re interested
in, rather than the tour of this somewhat
Disney-like city, you can’t help wondering if
this whole set-up is a bit sad; horses waiting
with unfathomable patience to be picked by
tourists, plodding around the same old cobbled
route, bracing the bitter winter weather and
madly trying to rid themselves of flies come
the summer.
Look a little closer though, and it seems all
this pity could be unfounded; hindquarters
are full, coats are gleaming (despite the grey
January day) and ears are pricked. Rewind an
hour or two and the day started in the most
unlikely of set-ups for these working horses.
Three-and-a-half kilometres outside the
city centre is the home of Mark Wentein —
international driving judge, proposed chef
d’equipe for the Belgian driving team at the
World Equestrian Games this September,
editor and publisher of Belgium’s equestrian
magazine Hippo Revue, and himself a Belgian
single pony champion. With his son Mathias,
he owns four of the 13 licences for carriages in
the city and has turned his 17th-century farm
into a yard that most top competition horses
would consider lavish.
“We forget that horses even 100 years ago
used to work 10, 12, or 14 hours a day — they
had a job, and that’s the reason that they were
bred,” Mark tells me as we settle down to lunch
in a dimly lit restaurant, the sound of hooves
gently echoing around the city walls. “People
forget that horses can still work if you treat
them well.”
TWENTY-SEVEN horses fill his
sprawling American barn, which was
finished four years ago, along with the
farm’s original stables — a mixture of Mark’s
competition horses, his son’s eventers and the
city’s carriage horses.
The working day for these horses is capped
at eight hours, after which they head back to
Mark’s yard for a compulsory two-day break.
And the lines between their jobs are blurred
— he likes all his carriage horses to be ridden
under saddle, and one that was in the city
yesterday could find itself drag-hunting
the next.
“All of my horses that I have competed were
Mark is passionate about drag hunting —
often taking his carriage horses out
started in the city,” says Mark, now in his early
60s and seemingly styled on an English gent,
all tweed and shiny brown brogues (“I love the
British equestrian tradition,” he says).“We have
no horse walker, so they walk in the city and at
the same time they bring us an income.”
With his matter-of-fact approach to
horses — “it’s all about time and money — it’s
a business” — Mark has built a thriving trade.
Stables have been designed so that they can
be mucked out using a machine, the carriage
drivers can open and close the yard’s electric
gates from the touch of a button on their
Mark Wentein, an
international judge, also
competes in driving
phones — so they don’t have to get out of the
carriage — and a futuristic app is used by all
employees showing which horses are in the
city, which are in need of the farrier and so on,
all of which is relayed on to a big screen in the
yard. A “washing parlour” with hot water and a
solarium is in place to make grooming easier —
the horses are turned out without rugs — and
natty fixtures abound, including magnets to
hold back the stable door windows.
But underlying this business focus is a
fixation on all things equestrian; looking
around his farmhouse you start to wonder if
you are having horsey hallucinations. You enter
via a door with a horse knocker, to the right of
which is a statue made from horseshoes. Inside
it’s hard to see wall space for the collection of
equestrian art adorning every room, a mirror
is framed by a harness, lamps appear out of
horse statues, a library has been dedicated to
his equestrian literature, and double doors in
the sitting room open on to the all-weather
outdoor arena.
Do your friends think you are a little
obsessed, I ask, only half joking? “I think so,”
he laughs. But it hasn’t always been this way.
Mark didn’t sit on a horse until he was 17,
when by chance he was next to someone
at school who was going to the local riding
school for his choice of sport that afternoon,
and Mark thought it sounded preferable to
basketball.
8 February 2018 Horse & Hound 37