I have just spent the day first picking raspberries and then planting all the lovely cheap plants I have bought at the last three weekends' summer fetes.

While in the garden I saw a young woman cantering by on the tarmac road (so already bad for the horse's legs), bare-headed and holding a mobile phone to her ear as she chatted away. The road which runs beside our house is not normally a busy one, but it is frequently a fast one. It is used as a rat run by people taking a shortcut between the two A roads and for diverted traffic when there is an accident on either of the main roads, as well as by those who have had rather more to drink than they would want the police to know about.

Suppose the horse was startled by traffic or by low flying aircraft (not unknown over Lincolnshire) or by dogs (lots of those about) or by farm machinery, and the rider is thrown, it isn't just the injuries to (or even death of) the rider, but the guilt that puts upon some innocent person who was doing no more than driving by, walking his dog or doing his job.