Round-up on Misty's island

Like millions of other little girls, and rather fewer small boys, I was a horse-mad child, with an obsession that merely intensified after my parents caved in and gave me my first pony at ten.

I read every horse book going; my favourites included those about horses possessed of an unbreakable spirit, like the pony in Misty Of Chincoteague.

This particular story was all the more wonderful because it was set in the wilderness of Chesapeake Bay - a part of America more impossibly romantic and exotically unreachable to me then than even Hollywood or New York.

But after the passing of more years than, as a child, I would have thought possible, there I was, on Misty's island, with the story recreating itself, right here. Chincoteague has barely changed in the years since local author Marguerite Henry described it in her true story about the wild ponies, and the taming of one of them, by two children, in 1947.

It's a remote lick of land, protected from the Atlantic by a larger barrier island, windswept and marshy and possessed, as I had always imagined it, of a coarse beauty.

I stood there transfixed, watching the herd of untamed ponies, some of Misty's descendants among them, making the annual swim from their home on the wildlife refuge of Assateague Island across the short channel to Chincoteague on their way to be auctioned, just as they did in my childhood book.

I was on my first trip to Virginia Beach, about three hours south of Washington DC, paying a visit to members of my extended family - and was planning not to stray far from the pleasures of deckchair, chilled wine and the freshest imaginable shrimp. Until, that is, I shrieked with excitement on seeing in the local paper that the folks of Chincoteague were making preparations for the annual pony swim that very week.

Virginia Beach lies at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, and a quick look at the map suggested it wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to get up to Chincoteague on the Eastern Shore of the bay.

We crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel in the silvery dawn light to arrive in good time. The Bridge Tunnel is 17 miles long, and connects two shores which may as well be a world away from each other. The relative sophistication of Virginia Beach gives way, on the other side, to a desolate landscape edged with sparsely populated fishingvillages, hundreds of square miles of forestry and unkempt Ma and Pop style garages.

A hundred miles or so further on, a causeway across the tidewaters, which begins with a massive Nasa site standing guard, ends in a little humped-back bridge taking you into Main Street (just about the only street), Chincoteague.

As though to greet us, there were the other stars of this show, the Saltwater Cowboys, dressed up for the occasion in leathers, hats and proud grins, clattering along the road on their sturdy little ponies, yahooing and putting on a show for the visitors.

The cowboys are actually members of the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Brigade, which tends the wild herd and owns the rights to the ponies. After a couple of devastating fires on the island in the Twenties, it was agreed that the past season's foals should be auctioned after the annual round-up, and the money raised spent on fire-fighting equipment.

The Saltwater Cowboys led us the length of Main Street and across a boggy field to where the channel narrows, so the ponies can cross in safety.

We waited for four-and-a-half happy early morning hours, ankle deep in sticky black mud and swamp grass on the shore, with the sun beating down, and summer insects making the most of the crowd, until the cowboys judged that the tides were favourable.

WITH a sudden burst of activity, whooping and hollering and firing of starting pistols, about 150 small wild ponies were bustled out of the scrub, down the beach opposite and into the water. The swim only lasts about five minutes - there's an interlude of silence as the ponies' heads bob in the water, and the crowds lining the shore hold their breath.

Then, after they've clambered out of the water on our side, another grand commotion, whinnying and snorting, pushing and shoving, hooves churning up the mud, as the herd recomposes itself.

The cowboys stand shoulder to shoulder to keep the ponies contained, as they shake and stamp to rid themselves of the salt water in their ears and eyes. Then they are escorted down to the pens where, after a rest, the auction takes place.

After the sale the ponies which are not sold swim back. During the crossing one young filly rebelled. She plunged into the water at the behest of the stetsonwaving round-up men - but then thought better of it and turned tail, scrambling back on to dry land. It took five strong men to get a halter on her, and one of them told me that they would put her into a trailer when she was calmer and drive her over the short bridge which links the two islands. 'I just hope,' he said with a laugh, 'that she doesn't tell the others what happened, or they'll all be hitching a lift.'

The round-up now attracts about 50,000 visitors - quite a crowd on an island that's only seven miles long and has just 3,500 inhabitants.

Once the 'incomers' melt away, the island reveals itself as an austere place where, in common with the rest of the region, a hard living is made from the sea. Steaming in summer and bitter in winter, isolated and windswept, it breeds tough characters.

The popular legend explaining how the dapper, mainly piebald, ponies came to be on the far-flung island of Assateague, is that their ancestors swam for their lives after the Spanish galleon on which they were being transported was shipwrecked off the perilous coast in the 16th Century.

But the more prosaic explanation is that the original (British) settlers hid their horses on the island to avoid paying the taxes which livestock attracted, and they eventually went wild.

In the original true story, a brother and sister buy the foal Misty and her wild mother Phantom for a hundred bucks. Only after, of course, they have defied the tremendous odds against them.

A record $10,000 was paid this year by one doting father for a yearling, and the firemen raised a total of $166,000 (£118,000) for the sale of about 70 ponies.

Bidding is fast and furious - but in spite of the hard-nosed competition there is always, in keeping with the romance of the original story, a Misty moment. A little girl whose entire savings add up to a lot less than the price of a pony is identified during the bidding, and allowed to buy a pony for the amount in her pocket. That was a very old-fashioned American moment.

And my detour up the Eastern Shore - and back to my childhood - is an adventure I'm so glad to have had.

Getting there

Virgin Holidays (0870 220 2466) offers seven nights at Virginia Beach from £459.This includes return flights to Washington, car hire and B&B accommodation. Supplements from Manchester cost from £130 and from Glasgow £150. The pony auction takes place every year on the last Wednesday and Thursday in July. For further information call Virginia Tourism (020 8651 4743).