Text 1: Two days in the saddle, by Kerry Ashworth

An original contemporary magazine article.

I had not sat on a horse since a donkey ride at the age of six, so I booked the beginners’ trek at a riding centre in the Brecon Beacons with some nervousness. I need not have worried. My pony, a solid brown cob called Marmaduke, had carried hundreds of beginners up these hills and had no intention of hurrying for any of them.

There were eight of us, led by a guide called Ffion who rode at the front and a teenage helper at the back. We spent the first half hour in a paddock learning to steer, stop and sit properly, then set off in single file up a stony track onto the open hill.

The views were enormous: green valleys falling away on every side, a reservoir glinting below and sheep scattering as we passed. In the afternoon the cloud came down and it rained steadily for an hour, which Marmaduke ignored and I tried to.

The hardest part came the next morning. Muscles I did not know I owned complained every time I moved, and getting back into the saddle took two attempts and a mounting block. By the end of the second day, though, I was trotting, badly but happily, and I have already booked again for the spring.

Text 2: A ride across the moor, by Miss Louisa Trent

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

In this letter, written in 1861, a young woman on holiday in Devon describes a day’s ride across Dartmoor on hired ponies.

My dear Fanny, I must tell you of our great expedition of yesterday, when Cousin Henry, Miss Ellis and I rode across the moor from Ashburton to Princetown and back, upon three moor ponies hired from the inn.

They are shaggy little creatures, hardly taller than a large dog, but as sure of foot as goats, and mine, which the ostler called Captain, picked his way among the stones as though he despised the whole of us. We took a guide, a silent old man named Coaker, who walked beside us the whole way and never seemed tired.

The moor is the wildest place I ever beheld: miles of brown heather and grey granite tors without a house or a tree. Twice the guide turned us aside from a patch of bright green grass, which he said was a bog that would swallow a pony to the ears. In the afternoon a mist came over so thick that we could not see one another, and we were obliged to dismount and lead our ponies in single file, while Coaker found the way.

We reached the inn again at seven, wet through and stiff in every limb. I could scarcely get down from the saddle. I would not have missed it for the world. Your loving friend, Louisa.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what the riders experienced on their rides.

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