Step One:
The riverside paddock at Luskintyre is empty of horses, but full of fences. Rebel has set up some classy wine barrel obstacles prior to our arrival but first, and without fail, it’s the obligatory trot poles.
A single pole is set up to start, then another two poles are set up four to five strides apart. The two exercises are set up on the two long sides of a rectangle. Using the oval shape allows the rider to practise turns.
“This sort of exercise I do with all the horses,” Rebel explains. “The baby horses start out with it and the more experienced horses do it too when they come back in from a break.
“We start off with the poles and keep the horses straight and forward. The number one rule with any horse is to keep it between your leg and hand – until that’s correct over the poles you shouldn’t move to anything else. It doesn’t matter how long that takes, either, it might take you one session, it might take you three days! There’s no need to feel that you have to get through all of the exercises in the one day.
“We work first in trot, then in canter, practising keeping the canter even through the poles and around the corners. You can’t get over the pole and then fang around the corner, you want to keep the rhythm – the turn is as important an exercise as doing the poles.”

Step Two:
After the poles, the horse can move onto the cross rails before starting the cross-country, checking that the principles of the poles are not lost. A pole is laid 8ft in front of a cross rail, and taken first at trot, then canter.
“You have to keep the same focus as you did over the poles,” Rebel says. “You are concentrating on keeping the trot forward and connected up to the cross rail, and you need the canter to be forward after the fence. Watch that you keep your lower leg contact on and don’t take your leg off over the fence.
“Whichever leg the horse lands on after the fence, carry on with that canter – you don’t need to swap legs unless they are landing on the same one all of the time.
“And after all of that exercise is confident and you are doing well, you can add another cross rail a stride away, making a grid.
“Now, if I am going to work cross-country, that’s all the showjumping I need to do. If I am going to do a showjumping session I can make more of a grid, but as a warm-up for cross-country schooling, that’s enough.”

Step Three:
For the first cross-country obstacle, Rebel has set up a whole wine barrel lying on its side.
“With a green horse you would use more than one barrel – two or three – to give them every chance of getting it right. I always use more rather than less, because you don’t ever want to run into a problem. So a green horse has a wider fence, the more experienced horse can have just one barrel. And I have jump poles to form wings on the side – the wine barrels can be quite spooky, it’s to your advantage to have them there, it helps to channel the horse into the fence, encourages it into the fence.
“We trot into that fence first, practising as we did over the cross rails that we can maintain the leg contact, the connection from the hand into the mouth.
“Once you are trotting into it competently, do it in canter, and then if you had three barrels, you can take a barrel away, then another, but keeping the rails as wings, and only taking them away when you know that everything’s right.”

Step Four:
Once the basic wine barrel fence is built, jumped, narrowed and yet still mastered … it’s onto the wine barrel bounce.
“You’re not jumping this at a great pace,” Rebel is quick to point out. “You set it up as a 10ft distance. For an experienced horse you can again just have one wine barrel width, but for the young horses always keep the extra barrels – and you can use 44-gallon drums if you can’t get wine barrels.
“When you ride into the fence, you don’t want to be holding the horse into the fence, you want him to be drawing into the fence. The natural progression of your jumping will be determined by the attitude of the horse – it might take a couple of days to get down to a more technically difficult, narrow bounce.
“We canter into the bounce in showjumping pace, just a forward canter, keeping the horse in front of the leg.
“It’s really important to keep your head up, keep the horse very straight. A bounce emphasises the need to keep the horse straight and every exercise we do goes back to the poles and cross rails, to the work we did there on straightness. That straightness is not just whether the horse jumped in the middle of the fence/pole, but also the straightness of the horse from the quarters to the shoulders to the nose.
“As we jump the first element of the bounce, we come in keeping the rhythm, head up, horse straight and in front of the leg. On landing, nothing changes, it’s such a quick combination, you maybe correct immediately anything that went wrong over the first barrel, like the horse drifting out through the shoulder. You encourage the horse forward – you still have to complete the fence even if you didn’t get the approach exactly right. That’s why we practise over a small fence, so that we can keep doing it until we get it right.
“Over the second part of the fence … we repeat the way we jumped the first barrel and on landing keep forward and straight. If you can be straight after the fence, it helps you to come into the fence straight again. Use your circle around to the fence again to correct any drift, to straighten the horse again.
“It’s very common for people to fall into a trot, lose concentration, gloat … but the riding after the fence is just as important as before the fence. You are either riding a transition or a turn.”

Step Five:
The next step is to put a wine barrel fence on a related distance from the wine barrel bounce, with a turn in between, jumping the bounce first, then turning onto the single fence.
“We’re trying to recreate a scenario that we might find on a cross-country course,” Rebel reminds us. “We may only be jumping fences in our backyard but I always visualise it as a cross-country fence. Every fence is important and every fence you jump is important to the horse.
“It won’t be just a wine barrel at the competition – it’s a valid memory for the horse and it contributes to its training and experience. You’ve just got to make it good and if it’s not, do it again till it is good.
“Four strides for your related distance is a common length – you the rider can make it four or five strides by the way you ride the turn. On the young horse, you will have more room to manoeuvre on a curve than you will if you set it up as a straight line. There is more room to correct any problems.
“Starting your curved line, again you would have more than one barrel in each fence, taking them away only when the horse is jumping confidently, and you can alternate your turn so that you turn first left, then right into the bounce after the single fence.
“Once you can cope with all of that, you can jump the fences in reverse order, taking the single fence and then the bounce.
“This increases the difficulty – instead of coming off a straight line into the bounce, you are coming in off a curve. You are cantering in watching the speed and rhythm in your turns and always it is important to keep a steady contact and to turn without swinging off their mouth. You need to use a lot of leg; you don’t have to haul off their mouth to come around the turn. You want them to learn to sight the fence for themselves, you don’t want to have to do it for them.”

Step Six:
“Once you have mastered the main line you can incorporate other fences that you have set up and the whole exercise is that the horse learns to get its eye on the next fence, be honest, be straight,” Rebel says. “The exercise might change but the theory stays the same and it’s up to your imagination how interesting you can make the fences.
“Every fence and every corner is a different obstacle and you want your horse to be looking for the fence.”
Adding an apex is one option, since, as Rebel points out, there is one on nearly every cross-country course from pre-novice up.
“They are an honesty test because the horse can run out over the pointy side – but we have already practised honesty and straightness over the barrels so we pick a point on the apex to jump and this is when we need our horse to be straight, there isn’t to be any drift over apexes,” she warns.
“Using the apex in your course at home is a further test of your horse’s training.
“We have to approach this fence in a slightly stronger canter, a more powerful pace, you have to be prepared to give more of a release because this is a bigger fence than the wine barrels. You have definitely got to keep your head up over a bigger fence, it’s very easy to be propelled forward over a fence this size.
“It’s very important that when you land over a fence you maintain your position and connection between your leg and hand – and remember there will still be another fence waiting for you even when you have just jumped a bigger fence.
“Once you can jump the apex on its own, you can jump the apex into the line of barrels to ensure that you maintain your line and rhythm into the barrels afterwards.”

Step Seven:
Rebel adds a tough-looking fence – it’s a single 44-gallon drum flanked by a couple of witches’ hats.
“You should only jump a fence like this if the horse is honest and confident,” she warns riders.
“I hadn’t had any poles down today, no run-outs, so it is appropriate to add it into my course."
“This is a difficult fence that you are only likely to find at three-star and four-star level, not that the height is so difficult, it’s the type of fence that it is.
“This kind of obstacle is a more daunting fence, you have to make sure that you don’t hook back into the fence and let the horse get behind the leg because there is such a small point of focus.
“You can feel that you might be wanting to ride backwards to the fence, be quite defensive, but it should be okay if you have done all the right work beforehand, sighting the fences, with the correct preparation.
“You can start out with a half jump rail on top to help the horse sight the fence, and at all times you should have a little ground rail. You can put jump poles out on each side to help a less experienced horse with the transition to the more difficult narrow fence.”

Step Eight:
To finish off, Rebel has taken advantage of the natural lie of the land to build a drop fence made from a half wine barrel upside-down with jump poles forming wings.
“You come into this one in a nice forward, strong trot to start with,” she explains. “It’s a downhill fence, it can be a bit of a bogey simply because it is downhill so you need to keep your approach quite strong.
“It’s very important that you keep your head up over this one. As you drop over the fence, you allow your legs to come forward and cope with the impact of the drop, which will allow your body to come slightly back, with a slight release of the reins as your shoulders go back and your arms extend forward.
“On landing, you have to regroup, check the canter, shorten your reins, regain any lost control, make sure that the horse is attentive and prepare for the next fence – don’t actually do the next fence until you can do all of that.
“You need your horse to be jumping confidently and not stalling at the drop fence – your body can easily get thrown forward if he stalls. When you can do that from a trot approach, you can canter in. Everything is exactly the same except that it will be a much bigger jump from the canter, so we exaggerate all the requirements – your body will come back more, for example, and you will release more.”

Step Nine:
“Finally, you can add a related fence after the drop fence. On undulating ground that adds to the difficulty because it is harder to balance the horse, keep the canter rhythm, pick the slope … it’s a bit of an optical illusion for the horse and rider because it’s not a flat surface. It may not feel the same to ride as it looks.
“When you are setting up the fences, remember to give an extra stride because it’s more difficult than the first related distance we did with the wine barrels. We want more of a distance to get it right. That’s the glory of related fences on a curve – if something goes wrong and they get in deep and jump out big you can take the four strides instead of five.
“When you’re building the related fence after the drop, always have the barrel on its side to start with, same deal with the jump poles on the sides, and when you are ready you can stand the barrel up and it’s a real ask, you have height as well as technical difficulty and the extra height makes it more narrow.
“It’s more important than ever then to be accurate.”

Basically, says Rebel, course-building at home is only limited by your imagination.
“You can mix the fences up, you can have your course all set up but do different parts of it each day,” she points out. “You could do the drop and then the apex. You’ve jumped all the lines already so you know how they ride.
“If something goes wrong at any time you can go back a level, put vertical drums back on their side, go back to the cross rails.
“To make my fences look like they are cross-country fences at an event, I will cut down brush and stick it in an arrowhead, fill it in the way it will be at the competition, put pot plants around it.
“Use your imagination to put anything there as long as it is safe and the horse has had enough preparation to allow it to cope with the fence.
“It’s better to spend extra time in preparation that to have something go wrong.”

Left: Rebel and Groover, members of the Trans Tasman Team in Taupo last month.