Leo Rocca, a property developer and manager, is ready for a rigorous spring. Over the past year, the 70-year-old from Middletown, Md., has been schooling four new horses, Hungarian warmbloods. Harnessed four-in-hand to a carriage, they took their first public drive along the sandy trails of Southern Pines, N.C., in March. Come April, they will trot through Virginia plantation country, then parade on the makeshift steeplechase course at Colonial Downs in an event known as Strawberry Hill, in honor of the original site of the racetrack. In May, they will traverse 20 miles along the Brandywine River in Pennsylvania on the estate of George “Frolic” Weymouth, an artist and DuPont heir who is eminent in this sport known as driving.
Rocca and his wife, Christine, have driven pairs—two horses pulling a carriage—for years, but their new quartet was not quite ready to perform last season. “In public the horses are really put to the test as to whether they can behave,” Rocca says.
For the drivers, called whips, and their passengers, a select but growing number of carriage events in North America and Europe beckon. Driving clubs sponsor some of the races, while some are private parties reserved for the inner circle. Weymouth, who discovered this pastime more than 40 years ago, has witnessed it make great strides. When he joined the local Four-in-Hand Club in the early 1960s, it had five members; now it has 52. Weymouth’s passion kindled when he moved to his mid-18th-century house—Big Bend—in Chadds Ford, Pa., and decided he did not want cars to taint a landscape that had changed little in two centuries. “People had old carriages in their barns and began to see using them as a lost art,” he remembers. In 1995 Weymouth painted a commissioned portrait of Prince Philip, also a driving aficionado whose image has helped popularize the sport.
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