- Tim Rooney, farrier (Marshfield)
Tim Rooney (Nanette Hepburn)
Brought up and schooled at Marshfield, Tim Rooney was, by his own admission, never happy in the classroom. “I wasn’t very keen on school, but I was always very keen on horses.”
Not surprising given his family background on the Levels. “In those days,” says Tim, “every farm would have a Point-to-Point horse” and local hunt masters like Lord Tredegar relied on a good supply of horses. Tim’s grandfather Gustavas, was a horse dealer and sold horses to the army. “He was still riding in his seventies.” Meanwhile Tim’s father, former soldier and Marshfield farmer ‘Guvo’, rode some 70 winners at Point-to-Point.
Tim started a shoeing business in 1972 when there were very few farriers around. There was no shortage of work. “We didn’t go out shoeing: a lot of hunt horses came to the forge.” Then there were the council workers who brought their hand tools in for sharpening or repair. “No mechanisation then. They don’t repair things now.” On one occasion Gypsy Tom Price arrived in a little van. “In the back was a Shetland pony!”
But now, he says, traffic deters owners riding their horses to the forge. “We go out to shoe virtually every horse: it suits us a lot more because the horses are quieter in their own environment.”
Life on the Levels Interview:
Tim, a farrier based in Marshfield, grew up on a dairy farm and played on the foreshore at the lighthouse as a child. He tells of Gypsy fortune tellers, buying and selling horses, beagle hunts and wildlife.