Edmund Spenser, the poet of The Faerie Queene, writing in 1596, bears this striking testimony to the Irish horse-soldier and inferentially to the Irish horse: "I have hearde some greate warriours say, that, in all the services which they had seene abroade in forrayne countreys, they never sawe a more comely horseman than the Irish man, nor that cometh on more bravely in his charge."

There was only one trail for a horseman south of Johnstown, and that trail followed the windings of the valley.

the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof !'