WORK HORSE balance
Pony trekking guide in Iceland
How I mak e it work: I use a Google Calendar with colour -coded sections to organise my time
The former digital archiver with a background in the heritage sector upped sticks five years ago and moved from the UK to Iceland where she leads treks for Vík Horse Adventure
My job…
I work at Vík Horse Adventure, a pony trekking centre in Vík í Mýrdal, a small village on the southern coast of Iceland. My official job title is ‘guide’, which means that I take groups of tourists out riding on Icelandic ponies along the amazing volcanic black sand beaches, although there is a lot of behind the scenes work, too, such as grooming and mucking out.
I first came to work here in 2018 for a six-month summer job, but I loved it and stayed on. The company has grown a lot in that time, so I am now one of five full-time guides, while five or six extras help out during the summer as well. This means that we have all taken on some administrative roles, too. For example, I am now responsible for the marketing, so I do the graphic design, create the brochures and press releases and run the website. In my off-duty time I do other graphic design work, including for a friend who has opened a café in an old yellow school bus. Sometimes I put in a few shifts as a barista there too.
How I got here…
Scandinavia and the Vikings have always interested me, so I studied archaeology at Nottingham University, with the plan to work in the heritage sector in some way. After uni I got a one-year Heritage Lottery funded traineeship at the museum at home in Ipswich. This was an all-round introduction to museum work, so I did collections care, helped with displays and exhibitions, plus front-of-house work, like giving talks to school groups and being on hand in the galleries.
When that had finished I couldn’t get a museum role due to the demand for jobs in the sector being so great, so I decided to visit New Zealand, and out there, while on the North Island, I worked with horses, including at a couple of racing yards, as a pony trekking guide, and on a sheep farm where they bred Clydesdale horses.
After a year Down Under I came back to the UK and worked as a digital archiver at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. I was there for two-and-a-half years, but realised that living in a city and spending every day indoors wasn’t for me. While in New Zealand I had learned that I could turn my hand to anything, from picking almonds to handling sheep, and so I started looking for something fun to do, just for six months, somewhere in Europe. I stumbled across this job listed on a Facebook group about Icelandic horses. With my interest in Vikings, plus having loved Iceland on fa
