Always be seen while out on your horse

How can you be sure you and your horse are as visible as possible to road and countryside users while out and about? The answer’s by kitting yourself out with a smart choice of high-vis, of course

Country & Stable are promoting the importance of wearing high-vis clothing when riding all the time, regardless of whether you ride on or off the road, the time of day or weather conditions. Horse riding is a high-risk sport but it’s important we mitigate and potential dangers by doing all we can to keep ourselves safe.

Ensuring you’re visible both on the road, as well as out hacking in fields or forests is vital. Being visible on the road can help to prevent road accidents, but also ensuring you’re visible in greener areas allows you not only to be seen in your surroundings but also from a height. This can aid in search and rescue if an accident were to occur or for a pilot to adjust their flight path to avoid spooking your horse.

Did you know?

Research shows that wearing high-vis can give drivers an extra three seconds of reaction time, which in turn can reduce the chance of an accident. To put this into context, if a car is travelling at 30mph, an increase of a three-second reaction time gives the driver an extra 40m of stopping distance, which is the length of a standard arena.

How does high-vis work?

High-vis clothing is made from fluorescent fabric and reflective strips. When sunlight or artificial light hit the fabric, it reacts to create a glowing appearance. The combination of reflective strips is to aid visibility in times of poor and low light conditions. Illuminated light sources, such as cars or torches will cause the strips to glow.

Fluorescent colours are used for high-vis clothing because they react with the ultraviolet rays of the sun and appear to glow. They’re exceptionally bright because of the way they absorb and emit light. This glowing of fluorescent colours is particularly effective in low light conditions – under tree cover, dusk, dawn and in misty or foggy weather.

How to be seen in the dark?

Although fluorescent clothing is ideal in daylight and low light, it doesn’t glow in the dark as is often believed. To be seen in the dark you must wear clothing with retro-reflective tape or bands, which reflect light back to its source with minimum scattering. This means when the light from a car headlight hits the retro-reflective tape, it’s reflected to the driver.

Wear a rainbow

High-vis clothing is available in a variety of different colours to suit every taste. The most popular and traditional colour is yellow, however you can also purchase orange and pink. When selecting your high-vis colours, you should always take into consideration the time of year and your most common surroundings. The contrast of colours to a background can really impact whether or not you stand out. For example, if you regularly ride past fields of rapeseed, yellow won’t stand out as effectively as pink. On the other hand, orange may blend into autumn leaves and hedgerows, so yellow or pink would be a better contrast in this instance.

How about choosing a mixed rainbow of colours? This may not be quite so easy on the eye but wearing a mix of the high-vis colours will create an extremely eye-catching moving object, positively affecting your safety.

Highlight moving parts

Research has shown our brains have the uncanny ability to recognise other human beings, this is called sensitivity to biomotion – an extremely good reason why you should highlight your body’s moving parts. A good recommendation for this is to wear a hat band to highlight the movement of your head or an arm band for when signalling. You can also highlight your horse’s moving parts using leg bands and a tail strap.

How often should you replace your high-vis clothing?

There is no set time to replace high-vis safety clothing due to several varying factors – but damage to the fabric and the number of wash cycles it’s incurred will affect its shelf life. It’s important to regularly clean or wash high-vis gear as dirt can hinder its effectiveness. Make sure you follow washing instructions carefully to avoid damaging your products. After washing your high-vis garments you should check it has retained its glowing qualities before wearing it off the yard again – after all, it could save your life.

Time to reflect

The image below is startling and really brings the reality of wearing high-vis into context. There are no laws to say that horse riders must wear hi-vis clothing when riding but it is definitely in your best interests to and something we would highly recommend.

We would love to see your high-vis style and hear your thoughts on this subject… Tag @countryandstable on Instagram and they may share your post.