Diary of a Shopkeeper, 16th August
Show week is ancient history, and it’s time to get excited about another celebration of Orkney’s agricultural life: Saturday 22nd August sees the Shetland Pony Breed Show coming to the county for the first time.
Everybody loves a Shetland: they have all the qualities of a 20-hand horse concentrated in a friendlier, less intimidating frame. Plus they have better fringes that Claudia Winkleman. Okay, you can tell I’m no expert. But the members of the Shetland Pony Stud Book Society are: they’ve been studying them, recording their lineages and educating the rest of us about them since 1891.
Every year Members meet in a different UK location to show their ponies and share their passion. In 2026 it’s Orkney’s turn. A team of volunteers has been preparing and fundraising for the past 12 months to make this weekend a success. Sixty exhibitors are on their way here, bringing 260 ponies with them. They’re travelling from as far north as Unst and as far south as southern England and Wales. Such is the draw of the event that the judges are coming from even further away, including Donna Irvine who’s making the trip from the Millbrae stud in Victoria, Australia.
Unless you’re a member of the Society, in which case there’s an opening ceremony on Friday evening, it all kicks off at the Mart early on Saturday 22nd. Doors open at 8am, but its expected that judging will take all day, so there’s plenty of time to have a leisurely start to the weekend and still spend hours amongst the ponies. There are various categories, each with their own specialist judge: black ponies, coloured ponies, small ponies, ridden classes and driven classes. New for this year’s show are classes for novice and broken coloured ponies, as well as ponies bred in Shetland and Wales, veteran, young handler and progeny.
What do I know about the niceties of what makes a prize-winning pony? Almost nothing, despite having lived next door to a field of them for thirty years and asked them many times to explain the secrets of their success. All I get in response is a twitch of a whiskered nose and a threat of a nip to my fingers. Maybe I’ll finally understand ‘equine conformation’ on Saturday, after watching Mrs SK Ross of the Transy stud in Perthshire judge this category.
Williamsons, Lochside Coffee and others will be providing food and refreshments, so there’s no need to go hungry. And with entrance to the show being free for all, you’ll have money left over to upgrade from a burger to a steak.
That, by the way, was the definition of success for Texas Swing hero Bob Wills. Looking back on his first million-selling hit, 1940’s ‘New San Antonio Rose,’ he said, ‘Yes sir, that’s the record that took us from hamburgers to steaks.’ Wills would have enjoyed the breed show. Not just because he was a lover of horses, often riding out in rodeos on his palomino stallion, Punkin, but also because one of his catchphrases, yelped in joy when a bandmember played a particularly exciting solo, was, ‘Shoot low sheriff, he’s riding a Shetland.’ That in turn was picked up in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where Sundance, in the middle of yet another gunfight, shouts, ‘Shoot low sheriff, they’re riding Shetlands.’
No one will be shooting low on Saturday. Everyone will be aiming high, for the biggest and finest display of ponies the country has ever seen, and a grand day out for all. The organisers, all volunteers, have put in a huge amount of work to make the event a success, and they’ve been supported by the generosity of many local business who have provided sponsorship or help in kind. According to the Society’s Breed Standards, ‘A most salient and essential feature of the Shetland pony is its general air of vitality, stamina and robustness.’ Those same words could be used to describe the qualities shown by the local organisers and their supporters.
Good luck to them, and see you at the mart!
It was a great day out. The weather was grey but dry, and the park mud-free. Large crowds of spectators turned up to look at the amazing array of immaculate ponies, watch the judging, and enjoyed the craft and food stalls. The mart cafe did a roaring trade, and drew a lot of praise. One visitor particularly praised the generosity of their bacon rolls. ‘It was so big,’ she said, ‘I had to take my false teeth out to get it in my mouth.’
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 20th August 2026. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.