5. March 2026

How The Fitted Horse Was Born — A Story of Heart, Heartbreak, and Finding My Purpose

Every business has a story. Some are born from opportunity, some from necessity, and some — the best ones, I think — are born from a moment when life brings you to your knees and you find something extraordinary in the getting back up. This is my story. It is the story of a horse whose soul spoke to mine, a series of events that could have broken me completely, and a partner who saw something in me that I had not yet seen in myself.

I hope that by sharing it, anyone who has been through something similar — who has felt let down, frustrated, or at a loss — might find something in these words that resonates. And I hope that every client who invites me onto their yard understands, from the very bottom of my heart, why I do what I do and how much it means to me to do it well.

My Forever Horse

It started, as the best stories often do, with a horse.

He is a PRE — a Spanish Pura Raza Española — and from the moment he arrived, I knew he was different. There are horses you own, and there are horses whose soul speaks to yours. He is the latter. My forever horse. The kind of connection that horse people spend a lifetime hoping for and that, when it arrives, takes your breath away.

I wanted to do everything right for him. Everything. He deserved the very best, and I was determined to give it to him.

The Saddle That Did Not Fit

When he arrived, I had an SMS saddle fitter out to fit him for both a dressage saddle and a general purpose saddle. I was an owner rider — not a qualified fitter, not someone with formal equestrian qualifications — but I had enough experience around horses to have developed a reasonable eye and a gut feeling that I was learning to trust.

And my gut feeling, after the fitter assessed him, was that something was not quite right.

He measured up as a narrow gullet. Now, I am no saddle fitter, and I was very aware of that fact — but something about that measurement did not sit easily with me. He was a PRE, a breed not typically associated with a narrow back, and something in my instinct said that this was not the whole picture. But I was not the professional. She was. So I trusted her expertise and we proceeded with the fitting.

From the very beginning, his movement under saddle felt restricted. Not dramatically, not in a way that screamed emergency, but in that subtle, nagging way that makes you keep glancing at your horse's ears and wondering whether you are imagining things. And then the behavioural changes started. Small things at first — a reluctance here, a tension there — but building gradually into something that I could not ignore.

After one particularly difficult schooling session, I said to the girls on the yard exactly what I was thinking. It feels like a saddle issue. They agreed it was worth investigating.

So I got the fitter out again. And what she told me stopped me in my tracks.

Despite two months of consistent muscle-building schooling work — work that should, if anything, have developed his back and broadened his measurements — he was apparently measuring even narrower than before. I was perplexed. Confused. Something about this did not make sense to me at all. But again — I was not the saddle fitter. Trust the professional. That is what you are supposed to do.

His ridden behaviour continued to deteriorate.

The Fall

Some weeks later, I had a fall. And then, some weeks after that, I had another fall. A bad one. A fall that broke my back.

What I did not know at the time was that the earlier fall had already cracked a vertebra. So when the second fall came, the damage was compounded in a way that I am incredibly fortunate to have walked away from — literally and figuratively.

I lay there, heartbroken and frightened in a way that I had never been frightened around horses before, asking myself the question that I suspect every seriously injured rider eventually asks themselves. How many times can I be this lucky? Surely my luck will run out.

The horse I loved was becoming dangerous to ride, my body was broken, and I did not know what to do next. It was one of the lowest points of my life.

The Trainer Who Kept Things Moving

Luckily for me — and I use the word luckily with full awareness of how fortunate I was — I had a very experienced trainer who was willing to keep my horse in ridden work whilst I was out of action. She was not going to let him lose his training, and she was not going to let me lose hope.

She experienced exactly the same issues I had. And she said exactly what I had said to the girls on the yard.

It is the saddle.

So we got a different saddle fitter out. And we made a decision that I think was one of the most important ones of this whole story — we told her nothing. Not about the history of the fitting, not about our concerns, not about the behavioural problems. We gave her a blank canvas and let her assess what was in front of her.

What she found confirmed everything we had suspected.

The saddle was so badly fitted that she did not want to see the horse ridden in it for assessment. It was, in her professional opinion, undoubtedly at least a factor in the issues we had been experiencing — both the restricted movement and the behavioural deterioration that had ultimately contributed to my falls.

I felt a complex mixture of emotions that day. Relief that we finally had an answer. Frustration that it had taken so long to get there. And a burning, determined anger that no horse and no rider should have to go through what we had been through because of poorly fitted equipment and the professional assessment that had failed to identify or acknowledge it.

The Frustration That Became a Spark

Finding a fitter who could actually help had been a challenge in itself. And when I started looking for a bit and bridle specialist in our area — because it was becoming clear that the saddle was not the only thing that needed attention — I hit another wall. Everyone good was booked up for months. Months. The horses and riders who needed help could not get it because the people with the skills to provide it were simply not available.

I remember sitting with my partner one evening, venting my frustration about the whole situation. The inaccessibility of good professional help, the impact that poorly fitted equipment was having on horses and their riders, the feeling that there had to be a better way.

And then he said something that stopped me mid-sentence.

"Why don't you do it?"

I looked at him.

"Every time you talk about your horse, your eyes light up. I see the passion in you for getting it right. Other horses and riders deserve to share that."

My immediate response was everything you might expect. I am not good enough for that. I am not qualified. Who am I to think I could do this? The self-doubt came quickly and loudly, as it tends to do.

But the spark had been lit. And some sparks, once they are there, simply will not go out.

Enrolling, Learning, and Discovering What I Was Made Of

After the initial wave of self-doubt subsided, I did something that felt simultaneously terrifying and absolutely right. I enrolled on a bit and bridle fitting course.

And I smashed through it with gusto.

There is a particular kind of joy in discovering that you are genuinely good at something you care deeply about. That the passion and the capability exist in the same place. My neurodiverse brain, which has always had the ability to absorb information at extraordinary depth when something truly interests it, was in its element — and what interested me, profoundly and completely, was the welfare of horses and the difference that correctly fitted equipment can make to their lives and the lives of the people who love them.

Around the same time, I was advised that a WOW saddle might be the solution for my horse. So I visited their stand at an exhibition and found myself in conversation with Maggie from WOW — a conversation that felt, even at the time, like one of those moments that changes the direction of things.

Two weeks later, I was on their fitter and retailer course at WOW HQ in Canterbury. You can read all about that experience in my previous blog — but the short version is that it was one of the most exciting, eye-opening, and transformative professional experiences of my life, and I came home knowing that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Out of Something Terrible Came Something Wonderful

I will not pretend that the journey that led to the creation of The Fitted Horse was an easy one. A horse whose movement was restricted and whose behaviour deteriorated. Months of frustration and unanswered questions. Two falls. A broken back. A period of recovery during which I genuinely did not know what the future held.

But out of all of that came something that I am more proud of than anything I have ever done professionally. The Fitted Horse.

I have now completed my bit and bridle fitting courses and I am travelling across Northamptonshire and the surrounding areas, arriving on yard after yard and experiencing, time after time, the difference that correctly fitted equipment makes to horses and their people. The moment a horse's movement opens up. The moment a rider's face changes when their horse begins to go in a way they have never felt before. The moment an owner realises that the problem they have been managing for months or years had a solution that was simpler — and more accessible — than they ever imagined.

It sets my soul alight. Every single day.

I will forever be grateful to my horse for the path he put me on. He came into my life as my forever horse, the one whose soul spoke to mine — and it turns out that his soul was not just speaking to me about our connection, but about my purpose. He showed me what poorly fitted equipment does to a horse. He showed me what it costs — in movement, in behaviour, in trust, and ultimately in safety. And in doing so, he gave me the most powerful possible reason to make sure that no horse and no rider in my area has to go through what we went through if I can do anything about it.

That is why The Fitted Horse exists. That is why I do what I do. And that is why, every single morning when I load the truck and head out to my first appointment of the day, I feel nothing but gratitude.

A Final Note — From the Heart

I did not expect writing this to affect me in the way that it has. I sat down to tell a story — my story, the story of The Fitted Horse — and somewhere between the beginning and the end, the emotion of it caught me completely off guard. I write these final words with tears blurring my eyes, and I make no apology for that whatsoever. Because if a story does not move the person who lived it, it is probably not a story worth telling. Every yard I visit, every horse I assess, and every rider whose face lights up when their horse moves freely — all of it traces back to one horse, one broken back, one partner who believed in me before I believed in myself, and one decision to turn the worst of it into something that matters. I am so glad I did.