They were the most amazing sight. There were twelve of them in total. I counted twice over to check their number. It was hard to be certain because they all looked so alike! All of them the whitest shades of grey, with faint rosy dapples on their rumps and their eyes dark and muzzles sooty. Their tails were so long that they dragged in the salt waters behind them as they slowed to a trot, flicking mud on to their bellies as they ploughed through the water. The estuary was at mid-tide and the sea was up to their knees, and they moved through it as if they were a part of the water themselves.

Then the horse at the head of the herd spooked at the sight of me in the long grass ahead and she halted dead with her head raised high. She was large and imposing but clearly female as she did not possess the thick crest of neck that marks out the stallion in a herd.

It’s funny how people who do not know horses always think the stallion must be the one in charge, but in fact, the lead horse is nearly always a mare. Her job is to keep the other mares in line and look for danger. So was I danger? She certainly stared hard at me for a while longer, and then she left the rest of the herd, who had come to stand behind her, and stepped slowly through the marsh water, approaching the grassy outcrop where I sat. I could see her nostrils working like bellows, taking in my scent on the sea air, trying to decipher whether I was a threat. She sniffed and she stared and then, satisfied that I wasn’t going to cause trouble, she dropped her head down and began to graze on the marsh grasses quite near me.

On her cue, the other horses in the herd began to graze around me too and soon I was in a magical circle, surrounded on all sides by these incredible grey marsh-horses. I could see now that the lead mare herself was pregnant. Quite fat with a foal in her belly, in fact. And she was not the only one. Two other mares were heavy with foal. A couple of mares did not appear to be in foal, and the others were too young to be breeding stock, two yearling colts, three fillies and a pair of stallions. Of the stallions, it was clear that one was the sire, the more powerfully built and older of the pair. The other stallion was his second-in-command, and they did not fight, indeed they appeared quite the companionable pair, grazing on the outskirts away from the mares and the young ones, keeping watch and raising their heads constantly to listen for any enemy or smell any danger on the ocean air.