We were riding the two cobs down the lane when I heard the car roaring its engine behind us.

I had seen it pull out of a long, winding driveway coming from a house perched on top of the highest point of the hillside, a few hundred yards along from our place.

It went the other way for a few seconds, then I could hear it screech, turn and start to hurtle back towards us along the long straight stretch of lane it was evidently using to get up speed.

We only had a few yards until we reached the back gates of our house. I looked behind and waved at the white car, expecting the driver to slow because, after all, he was our neighbour.

The car revved its engines and kept coming. I shouted ‘Slow down please!’ because Duey was starting to jump about, and he’s fairly bomb-proof.

Our poor horses are used to idiots after living in Surrey for so many years

Our poor horses are used to idiots after living in Surrey for so many years. We abandoned hacking out eventually, because of the cyclists, mainly, but the four of them have seen pretty much everything the world can throw at them.

So we held the line on this old Irish lane, or boreen, as what looked like a boy racer roared towards us. And we soon realised this was no ordinary game of who blinks, because he was coming at the horses’ back ends so fast we could only conclude that he was willing to crash into them, write off his car, kill them, us, himself and, we realised as he bore down on us, the three small children inside the car with him.

‘He’s not stopping!’ I shouted at the builder boyfriend, who had his arm outstretched while yelling: ‘Slow down mate!’

With what felt like an inch between the low bumper of a growling Honda and the back legs of the smaller cob, Duey, who had fallen behind as he jumped around, the car stopped and the driver slammed it into a manoeuvre that let out a deafening bang.

I flapped my legs around Duey’s sides to keep him from rearing over backwards on to the bonnet so that I must have looked like a Thelwell rider. But I managed to push him forwards towards our back gate as the car exploded again and roared around us to speed down the hill alongside our land.

We rode the horses inside the gateway, stunned into a disappointed silence on a number of fronts: we had been riding a lane with grass along the middle, marked with a tourist-board way-marker and signs telling drivers they must look out for children and animals; we have never seen fast cars here before; the road is only used by our nearest neighbours because it doesn’t really go anywhere and only leads to three or four farms; we came to Ireland to get away from this sort of thing…

We had dismounted and were walking the cobs inside the yard when I said: ‘I might go up the drive of that house and talk to them.’

And instantly I knew that was a mistake because, of course, the BB insisted he do it. He strode off and I waited ten minutes – five for him to get there and five for something to happen, before I got in my car and drove up there.

As I arrived, he was walking back down the drive so I pulled over. At that moment the boy racer drove up behind me, returning home, and I realised I had blocked him in. He couldn’t turn and flee, so the BB leaned into his window and asked him to please not do that to us again, especially if he saw me on the thoroughbred, because if he came up behind her she would go through his windscreen.

‘What was he like?’ I asked, as the BB got into the car and the white car crawled quietly and slowly up its drive. He was a young guy, quite apologetic. He said he wouldn’t do it again. ‘And what happened when you knocked the door?’

His father and mother answered. The mother was nice enough. But before the BB could even say why he was there, the old man roared at him: ‘You’ve got a cheek coming up my drive!’

‘What do you make of that?’ I asked, fearing I knew the answer. ‘Well, either no one else goes up his drive, or he means I’ve got a cheek going up it because I’m an Englishman.’

Either way, I guess we’ve upset someone. But given that we haven’t come to live on a remote peninsula to be afraid of getting on our horses because an aspiring rally car driver wants to use the lanes for practice, I’m not sure we had a choice.