08/24/2026
Scotland exported a great many things. Engineers, doctors, ministers, soldiers. It also exported a horse, and that horse did more physical work than all of them put together. 🐎
The Clydesdale takes its name from the valley of the Clyde in Lanarkshire, and it was made rather than found. In the eighteenth century local farmers crossed heavy Flemish stallions onto native Lanarkshire mares, wanting an animal that could pull a plough through wet clay in the morning and haul coal on a hard road in the afternoon. What they produced was a horse of enormous power that moves with a high, clean, almost showy action and has a temperament so steady that children were routinely trusted around them.
Then Scotland industrialised, and the Clydesdale went to work. They pulled the drays, the coal carts, the timber, the brewery wagons and the canal boats. Glasgow ran on them.
And they went out with the emigrants. Clydesdales were shipped in huge numbers to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, where they broke ground that had never been ploughed. There are parts of the Canadian prairie and the Australian outback that were opened by a Lanarkshire horse walking in front of a Scottish family.
Then the tractor came, and it happened fast. By the 1970s the breed was in serious trouble and was classed as vulnerable, with the population collapsing from hundreds of thousands to a few thousand worldwide.
They are still here. Careful breeders held the line, the numbers have slowly come back, and if you have ever stood beside one you will know that photographs do not begin to convey the scale of them.
They never asked for anything but grass and a kind word, and they hauled half the world into the modern age. Then we thanked them by replacing them, and they forgave us for that too. 🏴
Scotland exported a great many things. Engineers, doctors, ministers, soldiers. It also exported a horse, and that horse did more physical work than all of them put together. 🐎
