Roundpen for horse training

When you have a horse and plan on working more with horses it seems to be a good idea to have an appropriate training facility as well. Back in October of 2017 I was writing about the planned farm layout. Some things have changed since then but the basic idea of a horse training facility remains and so does the location for it.

We got some tall steel tube fencing segments and assembled a roundpen. It is about 18m in diameter and the walls are tall enough to remove the “I can jump this” idea from any horse’s mind.

One segment has a door. It is high and wide enough that a horse can pass through it but usually one would open a segment as it were a gate.

We also started to use the electric fence to form some sort of a pathway for the horse to roam around. If you look at the original design idea you’ll see me talking about a Paddock Paradise, which animates horses to walk around a lot and see many different landscape features and scary things like those rocks in the middle of the path.

The roundpen is now complete. The surface on the inside will change over time. Initially the training activity itself will make the gras be trampled down. Later the plan is to cover the whole area with sand. There might be training accidents and falling onto sand is much better than hitting hard ground. I’ve already removed some rocks and probably will find a few more as the fading gras coverage reveals more of them.

And training can now begin:

The roundpen was done by the end of May. Now as I write this we are at the beginning of July and summer has arrived. That means high temperatures between 30º C and 35º C and in direct sunlight it gets pretty tough. This is not a surprise but still one starts thinking about a covered training area. :-) For the time being some activities have to be scheduled early in the morning or very late in the day.

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