Verdmont Estate

28/02/2026

We had a wonderful warmblood mare that descended from all 3

14/10/2025

06/10/2025

My cousin.

It’s almost staggering to consider the world Lady Anne (Anne Isabella Noel Blunt) was born into. Her mother was Ada Lovelace, the brilliant and prophetic mind who saw the potential for computers long before the world had even conceived of them. To be the daughter of such a force must have been both an incredible inheritance and a daunting shadow. But Anne didn’t live in that shadow; she carved a path of her own that was just as bold, though in a completely different direction.

While her mother conversed in the abstract language of mathematics, Anne became fluent in the tongues of the world—French, German, Italian, Spanish, and even Arabic, a language that would later become the key to her life's passion. She wasn't just academically gifted; she had an artist's soul, expressing herself through the stroke of a pencil and the music of a violin. You get the sense of a woman who experienced the world deeply, through all her senses.

Her marriage to the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was a union of two fiery, independent spirits. Together, they founded the Crabbet Arabian Stud, but it was Anne who was the true heart and expertise of their legendary travels through the deserts of Arabia and the Middle East. Imagine her, a Victorian gentlewoman, trading her drawing room for the vast, unforgiving desert. While Wilfrid wrote poetry, Anne did the real, gritty work. She was the one who could converse with Bedouin princes and Egyptian pashas in their own language, earning their respect not as a foreign curiosity, but as a genuine peer who understood the profound significance of their desert-bred horses.

She was the one who could look at a horse and see not just its form, but its history, its spirit, its asil—its pure, desert heritage. It was her keen eye and her unwavering standards that selected legendary animals like the mare Rodania and the magnificent stallion Mesaoud. She wasn't just collecting beautiful creatures; she was acting as a guardian, a preservationist at a time when the ancient bloodlines of the Arabian horse were at risk of being lost forever.

13/09/2025

Venom (Harlin) and Tamsen at Australian Jousting Championships at Kryal Castle

08/09/2025

01/08/2025

Willingham Axl
Robert and Barbara Sampson