Mrs Ali Burden-Blake

Ali Burden-Blake was born in Portsmouth, England in 1974 to a policeman and a nurse. At 4 they put her on a pony at a campsite in the New Forest for a ponywalk. The regret started soon after! After that it was every weekend at the yard, mucking out, grooming, filling haynets, collecting shavings from the factory, all in the quest of earning a free ride once in a blue moon.

When she was 10 her family moved to Johannesburg, South Africa. She got her first pony, Alpha Centurion, and rode him and loved him everyday. Two more ponies followed, until, with crazy long legs, she moved up to horses. Her first, Red Admiral, was a young off-the-track thoroughbred straight from the racing stables!

More horses followed, with competitions nearly every weekend, in show jumping, dressage, eventing, showing, even pony club games. Eventually her first warmblood came along, Bodenhausen Kirschkern.

After high school she attended Kentucky Horseshoeing School and became a farrier, earning herself the class honours, and started Performance Farriers back in Johannesburg. With numerous clients, but a damaged knee, in 1996 Ali and Kirschkern went to Rhodes University together to study geology. They ended up in the Eastern Cape showing team.

Six years and few degrees later, the pair moved back to Johannesburg (via Natal!), and after managing a couple of yards, Ali eventually got a 'proper job' as a hydrogeologist. And in Decemeber 2004 she and her husband moved back to the UK.

Since then she's been a contaminated land consultant, a social media manager, entrepreneur, marketer, photographer and designer.

In 2014 her daughter started Pony Club, and eventually, after a 15 year break from riding Ali found a special 18 hand Irish Sports Horse called Boris, and got back into the saddle in 2015.

Boris was unfortunately diagnosed with a very rare intestinal cancer in 2016 and was put down, and after a very long UK wide search Ali found a wonderful new four-legged partner, Bunny, a coloured KWPN mare, with enourmous ears. The pair can be found on the dressage circuit in Scotland, where Bunny is usually freaking out at judges boxes, and Ali is seen to be riding 'sympathetically'!