May Star was born on the 1st of May 1998. An Icelandic foal taking her first few tottery steps below the great western glacier of Snæfellsjökull. Named in a burst of revolutionary zeal, twelve years later she finds herself taking me on a gentle tourist trek around her domain.
She uses just her first and second gears, a sedate walk across a summer wildflower meadow towards the seashore and then a brisk trot along the lava sands. Sensibly, she keeps her other three available gaits under wraps, realising that she has a rather tentative day tripper on board rather than a seasoned horseman in a horned hat. May Star is a five-gaiter mare, capable of the additional steps and paces that are the unique inheritance of the pure-bred Icelandic horse - the tolt and the flying pace both of which allow the horse to cover slippery, sharp-edged terrain with relative ease.
She is a beautiful horse. I got into trouble for describing her as a 'pony' before I first mounted her and from the saddle looking out over that straw mane she is definitely all horse. Although there is apparently no equivalent word for the mildly disparaging 'pony' in Icelandic, there are over a hundred different specialist terms for describing the colour of an Icelandic horse's coat. May Star is a blonde to my untutored, easily pleased eye but by the time I was bobbing up and down on her back, I had learned sufficient horse manners not to mention this to her. We crossed a small meltwater stream rushing over its bed of jagged volcanic debris without missing a beat.
Riding through an Icelandic landscape, it's easy to see why it has spawned a whole cast of spirit dwellers or the 'hidden people' as they are known. To the unseeing eye it is empty. To those watching we are a familiar couple plodding along. A hoary urban myth beloved of travel guide writers is that one in four Icelanders claim to have had intimate relations with elves or hobgoblins or sprites or trolls or whoever, depending on their base muggle taste presumably. I wonder who May Star sees in the Atlantic spray as we trot along the tide mark.
Iceland is a spectacular geology lesson laid out for all the hand-rubbing glee of generations of geography field trip organisers. The Snæfellsjökull's gleaming peak teases us like a shy bride behind her shifting veil of cloud. Ahead of us lies the petrified lava field of Budahraun - a fan-shaped arrested estuary of volcanic overspill - as if a giant's pot of treacle had boiled over and then been frozen solid in a twitch of the ice queen's wand.
My queen for the day is leading me on towards the midnight sun and home.
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