Exmoor Ponies
The Exmoor Pony is one of the oldest and most genetically distinct equine lineages on earth – shaped by millennia of wild living, rather than human selection, into an animal whose resilience is written into its DNA.
Despite their name, these ponies are not indigenous to Exmoor, but are an ancient type whose ancestors ranged across the whole of Britain and beyond long before any county boundaries existed. A remnant population did survive on Exmoor into modern times – enough to give the type its name and provide the foundation stock from which today’s herds descend – but the Exmoor Pony belongs to no single place.
Today, fewer Exmoor Ponies remain than giant pandas, placing them among the most endangered large mammals in the world. As natural grazers shaped by wild landscapes rather than agricultural ones, they are also among the most ecologically valuable – their hardiness and grazing behaviour making them uniquely suited to the rough, varied terrain of rewilding projects across Britain and Europe, where domestic livestock might struggle or fail.
The herd at Bamff belongs to Deborah Davy, whose life’s work has been dedicated to understanding and preserving what makes Exmoor Ponies irreplaceable. Davy’s research has shown that genetic diversity is the key to the Exmoors’ survival.
All living registered Exmoor ponies descend from fewer than fifty animals who survived a severe post-World War II population collapse. Those survivors became the founders of the modern population, and the genetic lines running through them – particularly the female lines, passed from mother to daughter – are the threads that connect today’s ponies to ancient origins stretching back to the last Ice Age.
Research has identified seven distinct maternal genetic signatures (mitochondrial DNA haplotypes) in Exmoor ponies. Preserving as many of these as possible matters because each one carries a unique combination of genetic traits that can’t be recovered once lost. Sadly, some founder lines have already died out.
At Bamff, the herd is managed to maintain the widest possible range of both female and male founder lines. Living as rewilded ponies, they roam freely as multi-generational family groups – and keeping their genetics diverse ensures they retain the naturally evolved characteristics that allow them to thrive in exactly that way.
Below is a complete record of every Exmoor pony that has been part of the Bamff herd – their parentage, lineage, and the family connections. Continuously kept up to date.
To view the herd register full screen, go → here.