A near lifetime fascination with blacksmiths does not extend to horses or the people who ride them !

WE all have character quirks - all together now, "some more than others", thank you - and one of mine is to combine a dislike of horses with a fascination for horse-shoeing.

These contrary feelings are seen at their most extreme at the Highland show which, as the world should know by now, will be held at Ingliston, near Edinburgh, later this week, get your tickets immediately, Scotland's greatest outdoor event, the show with -copyright of spokesmen for the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society for the past 30 years - "something for everyone".

That includes horses, hundreds of them. Be advised and beware. Even more, beware of people who ride them, make them jump over fences, walk alongside them, run in front to show the more slow-witted equines how it's done, groom them, pamper them and generally think that anything with four hooves and a superior expression is preferable to anything human.

They, that is the owners, don't exactly neigh: "Four legs good -two legs bad", but horsey types certainly think that way and encourage their ponies, hunters (in-hand and in-saddle), part-bred Arabs, Welsh, Highland, Shetland and who knows what else to have the same attitude.

It's not the fault of the horses. The theory is that people become like their pets, or the animals they associate with. My theory is that it's vice-versa - animals acquire the characteristics of their owners and in the case of most of those that Roy Rogers called his "four-legged friend" that is bad news.

Take Clydesdales. Watch any day of Clydesdale judging, a process designed to make eternity seem attractive, and consider whether the stolid ringsiders - brown raincoated and flat capped on the warmest of days, or at least it always seems that way - influence the stolid, glossy horses as they pace round or whether the horses have influenced the men. I rest my case.

But if I avoid the horses at the Highland show, and I will even though there will be more than 1,000 of them on the showground with at least one lurking at every turn, I will as ever make a point of spending time at the horse shoeing competition.

Why? Because starting from scratch with a bit of metal bar to make a horseshoe which fits a specific hoof perfectly must be one of the most skilled manual labour jobs there is.

I have watched barrel makers at work, paring staves to shape and fitting metal hoops, tin-workers, sheep-shearers, lumberjacks with axes, tilers, thatchers; I've , shawed turnips by hand, stooked sheaves, and done many other more mundane jobs round a farm when physical labour was a prime requirement.

But blacksmithing, or farriery, is the most skilled and I got a taste for it - watching, that is - at an early age because the village school playground ran up to the blacksmith's shop and forge.

It was not particularly busy. Clydesdales at that time had disappeared from the farms in our area and the dramatic revival of equine fortunes with the appearance of thousands of hobby horses, ponies, riding schools and showing was still to come.

But there were enough shoeing sessions to leave an abiding fascination. In fact one was enough, that combination of smoke, red-hot iron, battering hammer and most of all the evocative smell of burnt hoof.

I might have added the sight of the sweating blacksmith and the leather apron, but that might be misinterpreted. Whatever, the smith at work, particularly his language if the horse was fractious and the children crowding too closely round the smithy door, was a welcome diversion.

Over the years since then I've watched smiths at work and almost invariably been impressed by their skill and patience. That is most obvious at the Highland show where an hour can hardly be better spent than watching blacksmiths compete.

A surprise for anyone watching for the first time will be the average size of blacksmith. The smith of legend, from Wotan onwards, is an enormous, muscular man, hands like shovels, forearms like hams, veins like ship hawsers. When not pounding hot metal into submission or tucking a recalcitrant horse under his arm he could be found roaring in from the Duck Pond End as the village cricket team's demon fast bowler.

Compare and contrast with the blacksmiths on view at Ingliston, generally small and wiry, moving from forge to horse with a nimbleness and agility which will astonish. At least two will be wearing glasses, misting continually.

But, my word, they are good. If I had the proficiency with a word processor that they have with a hammer, file and nails, this article could have been written in, approximately, seven minutes. As it was, it took nine - yes, only joking. But don't miss the farriers at work.