Highland ponies have always been regarded as utility animals. For generations they served as pack and pannier carriers and were also ideally suited to all kinds of farm work, from ploughing the fields and carrying the crofters to market, to bringing home the peat across treacherous and boggy ground. Although mechanization has largely ousted the ponies from these traditional tasks, some are still used for light carting, row-crop work, and by cattlemen and shepherds on the hills. They are also used quite widely for forestry, dragging thinnings out of steep or soft ground, and for carrying bundles of young trees for planting to sites where motor vehicles cannot go.

The history of the Scottish Highlands was never peaceful, and it is likely that the ponies were used by the warring clans, so it seems appropriate that numbers of them served in the Army, even as recently as the Second World War, when they were with the Lovat Scouts. At one time troops mounted on Highland ponies formed part of the Scottish Horse raised by the Dukes of Atholl and were present in Edinburgh on the occasion of the King’s visit in 1903. For many years Highland ponies have been associated with the sports of stalking and shooting. The ponies’ great strength and their natural sure-footedness assures their continued demand for carrying sportsmen up the Scottish hills and carrying stags weighing up to sixteen stones (with a special saddle, itself a considerable weight) down those same rough, precipitous hills.