This is a very good comment and I second pretty much all of it. XD
Some additional info from my personal experience: We used to have two horses that were moderately trained: dressage, jumping, lots of riding out into the fields for one or two hours per round. They got exercise almost every day and knew us very well.
The longest trip I did with my horse was a round trip where we visited someone several villages over and then rode back in a curve. That was something between 10 - 12 km. We did that in somewhere between 3 to 4 hours, lots of walk, but several instances of trot or canter as well, if the path was nice.
Our horses liked to trot or even canter light slopes uphill, it was good training for them. Trotting or cantering downhill is more dangerous and hard on the horses forelegs so it shouldn't be done for too long. If the road was quite steep downhill, we sometimes even dismounted and lead them for a bit as it was easier for the horses to balance only their weight. So for your story you should likely establish that the horses are well trained, quite calm and collected and not too easily spooked. Some horses are more sure-footed than others (mine was great at it, the one I'm currently riding is as well - but one horse I rode a few years ago tended to stumble over his own feet a lot... not a good trail horse!).
Horses + the dark: It's possible, especially if there's lots of trust and at least some light because of a bright moon or similar. But most horses won't like it. We usually never rode in the dark, because the horses spooked far more easily and we ourselves couldn't see that well either... Once, I completely misjudged how early the sun set in November *coughs* and was still at a training session in a different village. I rode home while it was getting dark and halfway home the sun had set and I was still out in the fields. My horse tended to spook a lot, she was quite high-strung. But surprisingly, she behaved exceptionally well, didn't spook once, was alert but not nervous, and we got home without any problems. But that was her quite special character - many other horses would have reacted differently, especially without other horses.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2025-01-21 08:00 pm (UTC)Some additional info from my personal experience: We used to have two horses that were moderately trained: dressage, jumping, lots of riding out into the fields for one or two hours per round. They got exercise almost every day and knew us very well.
The longest trip I did with my horse was a round trip where we visited someone several villages over and then rode back in a curve. That was something between 10 - 12 km. We did that in somewhere between 3 to 4 hours, lots of walk, but several instances of trot or canter as well, if the path was nice.
Our horses liked to trot or even canter light slopes uphill, it was good training for them. Trotting or cantering downhill is more dangerous and hard on the horses forelegs so it shouldn't be done for too long. If the road was quite steep downhill, we sometimes even dismounted and lead them for a bit as it was easier for the horses to balance only their weight. So for your story you should likely establish that the horses are well trained, quite calm and collected and not too easily spooked. Some horses are more sure-footed than others (mine was great at it, the one I'm currently riding is as well - but one horse I rode a few years ago tended to stumble over his own feet a lot... not a good trail horse!).
Horses + the dark: It's possible, especially if there's lots of trust and at least some light because of a bright moon or similar. But most horses won't like it. We usually never rode in the dark, because the horses spooked far more easily and we ourselves couldn't see that well either... Once, I completely misjudged how early the sun set in November *coughs* and was still at a training session in a different village. I rode home while it was getting dark and halfway home the sun had set and I was still out in the fields. My horse tended to spook a lot, she was quite high-strung. But surprisingly, she behaved exceptionally well, didn't spook once, was alert but not nervous, and we got home without any problems. But that was her quite special character - many other horses would have reacted differently, especially without other horses.