Livery Yard & Stables in High Beach, Epping Forest

Most liveries within reach of London have the same problem: to get your horse onto anything other than a road, you have to box up and drive. At Willows you ride out of the yard and into Epping Forest. Six thousand acres of ancient woodland, with miles of established bridleways, begin at our boundary — you can hack for hours without touching tarmac, and in the middle of a summer week you'll often see nobody at all.

That is the whole reason the yard exists in the form it does. It is small, it is private, and it is quiet. The horses live in a settled group, the fields are proper grazing rather than paddocks scraped out of a car park, and the atmosphere is more like a friend's farm than a commercial centre. There is no arena hire diary to fight over and no queue at the gate.

The yard shares the site with our caravan park, which produces something we didn't entirely plan: a number of people live here and keep their horse here, thirty seconds from their front door. If you have ever driven forty minutes each way twice a day in the dark to muck out, the appeal of that will be immediately obvious.

We have loose boxes across two yards — a main yard and a more secluded one for horses that do better away from the bustle. Boxes are properly sized, with water and lighting to hand. There is a floodlit ménage on site, which in an English winter is the difference between riding through the season and not riding at all, and it means you can school after work in December without hacking out in the dark.

Grazing is turned out in the fields you can see from the yard, and the site is gated with CCTV, which matters more for equestrian property than people like to admit. Tack, rugs, trailers and vehicles are behind a locked gate on a site where residents live and notice things.

Freelance groom services are available if you need them — for holidays, for a busy work period, or simply for a hand on the days when everything happens at once. That is arranged directly and by conversation, as most things here are.

We're at Lippitts Hill, High Beach, IG10 4AW — inside the forest, minutes from Loughton and Chingford, a short drive from Waltham Abbey and Enfield, and close to M25 Junction 26. For anyone in north-east London or west Essex looking for livery near London where the riding genuinely starts at the gate, the drive here is worth the map check.

The yard suits owners who want their horse to have space, a settled herd and real hacking, and who would rather have a quiet yard than a busy competition centre. It suits people who work and need a floodlit surface to ride on when they get home. And it suits anyone who has thought about living where their horse lives — because here, unusually, you can.

Livery availability is limited and moves by word of mouth, so the best thing to do is ring. Call 07816 847541 and we'll tell you honestly what we have, what it costs and when. Visits are by appointment; come and see the yard, walk into the forest, and decide from there.