South Park Shetland Pony Stud
The South Park Stud’s foundation mares were bought in the 1870s by
Ladies Estella and Dorothea Hope, sisters of the Earl of Hopetoun. They
kept and bred from the ponies at their family’s estate, Hopetoun House
in Scotland, and the ponies are entered in the first Stud Book of the
Shetland Pony Stud Book Society: the only stud then or since to carry no
prefix to the names of the ponies. By 1900 the Ladies had sold ponies to
both Queen Victoria and the Empress of Russia. Before the Great War the
Ladies and their ponies moved to Robertsbridge, in Sussex, from where
they continued to breed and show the ponies until the death of Lady
Estella, aged 92 in 1952.
The Stud was inherited by Lady Estella’s great-niece, Lady Joan Gore
Langton, she introduced the now world-famous “Fairy” prefix that the
ponies still carry. The ponies passed to Lady De La Warr following the
death of Lady Joan in 1989; Anne De La Warr was a niece by marriage of
Lady Joan, and is the mother of the present Earl of Hopetoun, and it was
a great excitement when the Stud was moved from Robertsbridge to
Buckhurst, thereby continuing its unbroken family tradition. We still
breed from exactly the same historic bloodlines, we have the 6 original
families, all named with the initial of their dams, with the B,C,F,I R,
and V lines and we still like to line breed using only stallions with
Fairy bloodlines. this year, 2009 we have three homebred stallions we
plan to use.
South Park Stud is the oldest registered herd of Shetland Ponies still
in existence today. We sometimes have ponies for sale and welcome
visitors by prior arrangement.
Anne De La Warr
