13th August 2018

13th August 2018

My blog has been slightly (ok massively) neglected this year, the last few months have been really busy for all the team. The horses have been running well and since May we have had 18 winners (jump and flat) from just 99 runners which equates to an 18% strike rate. A couple of the many highlights have been seeing Rickyroadboy progress well winning 3 races so far this season, Bit of a Quirke completing a 4 timer at Chester and Woody Bay winning at Newmarket to give us our 100th winner.

Every spare moment has been spent working on completely resurfacing our gallop. The past few years in the wetter months we have had drainage problems leading to a slightly uneven surface, we decided to take the plunge and invest a lot of money into it last year and on the 30th of May this year the work began. Below are some pictures illustrating the work that has been done.

The first job was to take all the old surface off

A trench was then dug all the way down the middle

The next job was to lay a woven geotextile, lay a drainpipe down the middle and cover with 1200 tonnes of stone.

It was then time to put a non-woven geotextile on and start the hardest job of all, putting the surface down. We put down over 700 bales of carpet fibre (220 tonnes) which was all levelled by hand. Two of our team members, Harry Kinder and Marcus Haigh deserve much of the credit as they did 90% of this job which was back breaking work mostly completed during the heatwave.

The final job was to roll the surface to compact it.

We have been using the gallop again for a couple of weeks and so far we are really pleased with how it rides. I believe it will be a massive benefit to the horses and should cut down on injuries during training.

I will try not to leave it so long before my next update!