Text 1: Slow road: a week behind a horse, by Erin Dacey

An original contemporary travel article.

Our home for the week was a bow-top wagon, painted red and green, about the size of a garden shed and pulled by a patient grey cob called Duchess. The company that hires it out in the Welsh borders gives you an hour’s lesson in harnessing, a map of quiet lanes and a phone number for emergencies.

Inside there was a double bunk across the back, a gas ring, a cool box and cupboards in every possible gap. It was snug rather than spacious; two people could stand up at once if they were friendly.

We covered eight to ten miles a day, walking beside Duchess more often than riding, because she went faster when someone talked to her. Each afternoon we stopped at a farm on the company’s list, where there was a paddock for her and a shower block for us. Feeding, watering and brushing her took the best part of an hour morning and evening, and I came to love it.

People stopped their cars to photograph us. Children waved from gardens. One elderly man told us his grandmother had travelled the same lanes in a wagon just like it, and asked if he could pat the horse.

Text 2: A gentleman’s land yacht, by Dr Lionel Strand

An original travel book written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this extract from a book published in 1887, a doctor describes touring the English countryside in a horse-drawn caravan he had built for himself.

My caravan, which I call a land yacht, was built to my own plans by a wheelwright in Gloucester, and is eighteen feet long, of oak panelled with pine and painted a deep green. It contains a sleeping berth, a stove, a bookcase, a cupboard for china and a small washstand, and it weighs two tons, so that it requires two strong horses to draw it.

I travel with my coachman, John, who walks at the horses’ heads, and a stable lad, who rides ahead upon a pony to choose the night’s halting place and sleeps in a tent pitched beside the caravan. On a good day we cover fifteen miles. On a bad one, when a hill is too steep, we must hire a third horse from a farmer, at a cost I prefer not to record.

The country people take us very generally for a travelling show. At one village a woman asked what time the giantess was to be seen, and at another the constable followed us to the parish boundary as though we meant to steal his geese. Gentlemen’s servants have refused me water at the lodge gates.

Yet there is no rest like it. I rise when I wish, eat when I am hungry, and see the face of England as no railway traveller ever can.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what it was like to holiday in a horse-drawn caravan.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.