Equestrian Wonder: 84-Year-Old Woman on a Pony Stirs Amazement and Concern in the U.K.

It’s getting harder for Jane Dotchin to make her annual trip to Scotland.

She’s 84, needs two knee surgeries and is finding people don’t have as much patience for an elderly traveler.

She’s also on a pony.

For more than half a century, Dotchin has been trekking 600 miles from her home in Northern England to the Scottish Highlands and back. She has battled storms, reckless drivers and unforgiving terrain, subsisting on minimal food and the companionship of a dog she carries in her saddle bag.

On the home stretch of this year’s journey, with Diamond the pony and Dinky the Jack Russell in tow, Dotchin is contemplating making it her last. The prospect is dividing family and friends, who have drawn both inspiration and exasperation from the aging pilgrim’s trips.

“Some people say I’m brave,” she said during a stop on a trip she expected to complete in mid June. “My sister thinks I’m an idiot.”

Dotchin’s journeys have been a half-century odyssey of self-sufficiency and resilience, for herself and the ponies and dogs who have accompanied her.

The one-eyed former horseriding teacher hasn’t just navigated brutal weather, a hip replacement and a notorious bog in the Highlands. She also has charted a changing Britain, in which wildlife has thinned and drivers have become less accommodating to her traveling trio.

This year, her 51st expedition, she had to turn back 100 miles shy of her usual endpoint.

“The wind and rain have always been the biggest obstacle,” Dotchin said, speaking from the road in Perthshire, Scotland. “But now it’s my limbs.”

History is full of tales of remarkable journeys undertaken by individuals, even in their later years. Alvin Straight famously rode his lawn mower 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin at 73 to see his sick brother.

But Dotchin’s five decades of dedication tells a story all its own.

Not even the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in 2001, which brought much of the U.K. to a standstill, could unnerve her. Dotchin swapped her pony for a bike and pedaled her way up to the north of Scotland.

Her missing eye—the result of a cow horn incident in 1984—means she struggles to see sideways. She nearly lost her other eye when a twig hit it, causing an infection.

But there have been few true interruptions: a broken wrist in 2007 after a forestry wagon drove into the back of Diamond landed her in the hospital, and a hip replacement in 2023 kept her off the trail the following year, prompting concern from locals.

But time is catching up. These days lifting saddle bags onto Diamond, and even mounting the pony herself, requires the assistance of a gate.

“Whether I’ll do it anymore I don’t know,” she said.

However, like fans clamoring for an aging sports star to come out of retirement, some of Dotchin’s friends are already rallying to get her back in the saddle.

“She can hardly walk. I don’t know how she keeps doing it,” said Anne Bannatyne, a civil servant living in Biggar, Scotland who has hosted Dotchin on her journey for nearly a decade.

“I would never say she should give up,” she said. “Absolutely no way. Never.”

Others fear Dotchin is pushing herself beyond her physical limits.

Helene Mauchlen has welcomed Dotchin in her Scottish home for 15 years but thinks this year’s abridged journey is a sign she should stay closer to home.

“Hurrah—that is a good decision,” she said on hearing her friend might rein it in. “But who knows after she gets bionic knees!” she said of Dotchin’s upcoming operations.

Dotchin’s nomadic instincts were first awakened over 50 years ago when she was invited to stay with a friend in Bristol, England, over 300 miles south of her home in Hexham. She accepted as long as she could bring her stallion, which she rode all the way there. “After that I got the bug,” she said.

In the following half-century, Dotchin has noticed changes to the landscape. The traffic has gotten worse, and people shout at her, saying horses shouldn’t be on the road.

“Horses were on the road long before your cars were,” she replies.

Off the road, those she meets remain as friendly and hospitable as ever.

Dotchin’s bright yellow vest and signature eye patch make her instantly recognizable to the farmers, business owners and friends who eagerly await her passage—and help her through locked gates.

Rab Black, who lives in Connel in western Scotland, first came across Dotchin in 2020 making her way slowly along a path near a remote railway station. He looks out for Dotchin en route each year, hoping this year won’t be his last chance. “I would love to see her again,” he said.

Dotchin covers 15 to 20 miles a day, fueled by oatcakes and cheese in the day and porridge at night. Her contact with friends and family is minimal.

Dotchin stays anywhere from sheep sheds to log stores to locals’ outbuildings when the weather is too bad to camp outside.

When hunger calls for more than basic fare, Dotchin forages for nettle tops. “I boil them and add cheese,” she said.

On rare occasions, she accepts the hospitality of friends like Bannatyne.

Dotchin said several years ago she unknowingly met Queen Camilla, the then-Duchess of Cornwall, near the royal family’s Scottish estate of Balmoral.

“I didn’t realize who it was,” said Dotchin, who doesn’t read newspapers or watch TV. “I just thought it was somebody with a little dog who looked like mine.”

It was only when she encountered her again the following year that Camilla’s security guard explained who Dotchin had just met.

On the third encounter, around five years ago, she accepted an invitation to stay in the now queen’s holiday cottage.

“I wasn’t used to all the modern equipment,” Dotchin said, “so I got my stove out to cook.”

Write to Natasha Dangoor at natasha.dangoor@wsj.com