The heart of a saddle is its frame - referred to as the saddle tree. These come in many variations of shape and size to cater for saddle style, seat length and variations in horse conformation.

The most common tree construction is with resin bonded plywood laminates, strengthened with metal reinforcement in the appropriate stressed areas. Creeping in, and common in Continental saddles, are injection moulded plastic trees. Whilst early examples of plastic trees were prone to failure, these are now well up to the job.

The term 'spring tree' is often stamped on saddles. This distinguishes that type from the older 'rigid tree'. The two terms are fairly self-explanatory. The rigid tree is a solid, stiff structure, while the spring tree is more slender in construction, utilising spring steel to allow some flexion. This has a bearing on the comfort of both horse and rider. In the early days there was considerable commercial gain from advertising the use of a spring tree, but nowadays this is almost universal.

The pictures show that the saddle tree is an open structure with no obvious seat for the rider. The saddlers first job is to attach strips of webbing from end to end, which will provide a suspended, dipped seat. The curvature of the desired seat profile is obtained using strips of webbing crossways. The whole assembly is tensioned down against the action of the prings. This process is known as 'webbing up'.

Modern saddles have a layer of foam rubber or latex glued to the webs. There is a wide variety of foam available, giving a choice of soft or firmer seats. Over this is a piece of hide that is stretched and shaped to take on the curvature of the seat shape. Special pliers are used to achieve this and it is important that all the stretch is taken out of the leather to produce a tight, wrinkle-free seat covering.

This process is known as 'blocking' the seat. At this stage the leather is only temporarily secured to the tree, the reason being that it will need to be removed for the skirts to be seamed on, once their location has been marked off on the seat cover. Once the seaming has been completed, the whole assembly of seat middle and skirts is tacked or stapled to the tree, once more using the straining pliers to ensure that it is tight. It should assume the exact shape of the tree seat filling, thanks to the blocking process.

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