February Newsletter 2026

Hi everyone and welcome to our February newsletter! We thought it was fitting to put a pic in of the type of water levels we are currently dealing with at the farm – the picture shows our lowest haylage field which is completely under water as the burn has burst its banks!

We have never known rain like we have had in January/start of February – it has literally been heavy rain every day since the snow melted which makes every task take a bit longer and tasks in general harder work! Our team have been amazing though – battling through the awful weather each day and still smiling – just! 🙂

WELL DONE MADGE!

We had a great couple of educational sessions in January – one covering lunging and one covering horse behaviour/training young horses. Madge took part in both of them and very much enjoyed having an audience, although she was a little jealous that Neco took part in the lunging session too and stole some of the limelight.

It was lovely to be able to help our members get a better understanding of how we work with the horses and how horses learn, which will help them put it all into practice in their own sessions.

PROJECT MARIO!

So, Project Mario was such a success in Autumn 2025, that we have been awarded National Lottery Community Funding (Scotland) to run 2 more courses with the same structure and format. So, we will be running one course for 11 weeks in the Spring and one course in the Autumn, again for 11 weeks. We will be working with Befriend a Child again as the referral organisation and are hoping that we will have some members sign up as volunteers for the charity again to do some driving for the young people. The project is aimed at young people (aged 11–16) from low socio economic households to try to engage them with different activity and to let them get the benefit of spending time with horses and ponies and building their confidence and communication skills. Befriend a Child are a brilliant charity, and they are reliant on adult volunteers to provide transport for the young people to the activities, so keep an eye on our Facebook page for further updates around volunteering opportunities for this amazing project.

LIAM IS OFF ON HIS TRAVELS!

Liam is taking 3 months off work from April – July this year to go travelling – it’s something that Liam has always been keen to do and as an employer, we are supportive of him taking leave as travelling is a great way to develop both personally and professionally.

Our current coach team will be covering Liam’s group sessions as it is far better for us to cover the sessions with existing coaches who know the horses and riders than to take in a new coach for a short period of time. So, group lesson coverage will be as follows:

Thursday 4.30pm – Sophie

Saturday 9.30am – Laura

Saturday 1.30pm – Sally

During the time of Liam’s travels there will be some changes to some private lesson timings with other coaches as they are covering group sessions, but Ali will keep everyone right with their sessions when booking and all of Liam’s mid-week therapy sessions will continue with one of our existing coaches.

VACANCY

Liam’s travelling time means that we are looking for a staff member on a temporary contract to work on the yards. This is a great role for someone who is looking to join a great team, working with great horses with set hours. We will be advertising for someone to work the following hours:

Thursday 12pm – 5pm

Friday 8am – 5pm

Saturday 8am – 5pm

On the Friday and Saturday there are 1.5 hours break (lunch hour and 2×15 min breaks) and on the Thurs there is a 15 minute break. Applicants need to be experienced handling a range of horses, capable of leading 2 or 3 horses at a time and carrying out all yard tasks including (but not exhaustive of) mucking out, filling haynets, turning out and catching in, grooming and preparing school horses for lessons and general tidying. Further details are available on our public Facebook page if anyone knows of someone who is looking for some work with horses.

GROUNDWORKS AT YARD

As members will have noticed, we have some contractors on the yard at the moment, who are carrying out some repairs to the rainwater drains on the yard. There is an area of the car park sectioned off for the contractors’ equipment and vehicles so do please ensure you stick to the speed limit when driving into the yard. The initial works will all be taking place on the far side of our road, but there will then be a point where the contractors are doing some work along the side of our building.

EDUCATIONAL SESSION

We are going to be running another educational session on Friday 27^th February at 5.30pm – 7.00pm with Sally, titled “Trying and Buying a Horse”.

For this session, Sally will cover lots of info around how to assess whether a horse is a suitable purchase, the process of buying a horse and how to manage a new horse. The session will be mainly theory (meaning we get to stay in the warm!) with some pics/info in a presentation. If you’d like to attend the session, then you can book through reception – the session will be really informative for anyone who has an interest in different types of horses/how to assess them/costs of horses and livery e.t.c. and also how to manage your new horse in the best way to ensure a great partnership. The session costs £20 per person to attend and will last around 1.5 hours. There is also the option to attend remotely via video call for those who can’t attend in person, but it will be a live call function only with no recording available.

GENTLE REMINDER 🙂 A gentle reminder from Sally and Ali this month (who normally get the unfortunate job of cleaning up) to everyone to please try to keep our toilets nice and clean. Janine cleans the reception and toilet areas really thoroughly once a week, but more and more recently we have to go in and pick up lots of paper towels which have been thrown on the floor, turn off the taps, or………. worse….. 🙂 So do please try to clean up after yourselves and if you are the parent of a young child, who is still learning about being independent going to toilet e.t.c. could we ask that you check the toilet afterwards that it has been flushed and is clean for anyone using it after. Sally and Ali would be most grateful!