Photos by Barry Wallace
Whenever I drive past Windy Hill Farm, on Keele Street just south of Hwy. 9, I always eagerly anticipate seeing Windy Hill Farm's percherons. Two of the mares and their offspring were close to the road on Friday morning of this week and I pulled the Jeep over to the shoulder of the road, grabbed my camera and moved close to say hello. The mother and son pictured above were very cooperative and patient in posing for me. What magnificent creatures, but then all heavy horses are special to me. The percheron was originally bred in le Perche, a district of northern France, as a powerful breed of cart-horse. They are usually black or grey (or somewhere in between), but it is mostly the black percherons that I have been familiar with throughout my life. My maternal grandfather used one on his small farm, south of Barrie, back in the mid-1950s. I'm known to say now and then, that I became a man on the day I first harnessed a team of my grampa's horses. I was 14 years old and Maude, the percheron, was one of the two horses.
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Barry Wallace
beautiful.
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