Holidays with your horse prove a gap in market for farming family

Who can forget the marvellous performances of the Team GB Olympic and Paralympic equestrian competitors of the London Games, when Samantha Baker won gold in the dressage and Zara Phillips, Nicola Wilson and William Fox-Pitt took gold in the three-day eventing?

The Games were to ignite a passion in the rest of the country for competitive sport that may not now be burning quite as brightly as last August, but, on a farm near Easingwold, there is real hope for those who want to make that first step along the way on horseback.

Bill and Sue Raper of Thornton Lodge Farm moved in to the world of holiday accommodation with a difference at the turn of the century and today they provide for a new niche market of taking your horse on holiday with you, plus they have also developed their own trimmed down three-day event.

They have two bed and breakfast rooms and a small caravan site for five touring caravans that runs alongside their existing farming enterprise, which is contracted out to a neighbouring farmer.

“The ‘bring your horse’ holidays are starting to get really popular,” says Sue who is also a renowned breeder.

Following a successful 
career as a jockey in Point to Point racing her horses have been winners at county shows, have appeared at the Horse of the Year show, become leading dressage 
and show jumpers, and have won at National Hunt.

“We have all the facilities that horses and riders need from the most fantastic bridlepaths to our own personally designed cross country courses.

“We’re very privileged to have so much off-road riding around here and that’s one of the main attractions.

“You just don’t seem to get that in other parts of the county.

“From here you can get right up to Ampleforth in the woods. The little lanes and farm tracks are ideal too. It’s parties of four, six or eight who often come generally all of similar ability perhaps from a riding club. They stop here up to around a week and because everything is so close they will go and feed their horses in the morning before they have their own breakfast, then they will go out for the day or half a day.

“I give them routes but often they have done their own homework before they get here. Many of them like going around our cross country course that has different levels of difficulty dependent on their experience.”

Sue also runs three hunter trials a year and the first of those took place last week, seeing an entry of over 100 with competitors from as far afield as Northumberland and Cumbria.

“Our cross country course was brought about thanks to the three-metre margins that we had to put in around the fields during the days when we were in the Countryside Stewardship Scheme. That has now been extended to a nine metre margin, which makes it easier for us to alter the course and be much more flexible.”

This week and every fortnight during the summer Sue and Bill are embarking on their mini one-day event.

“Every two weeks on a Friday night we will be running a one-day event that is really a scaled down version of a three-day event for those who may just be getting into horses. We are going to have dressage, show jumping and cross country all in one night.

“That means you can be involved if you’re a child or if you’re on the wrong side of whatever age you choose to think is too old.”

The cross country course, fishing lakes, caravan site and holiday accommodation all came about due to the depressed state of farming in the late nineties when crop prices were at an all-time low.

Thornton Lodge had been just another regular farm growing cereal crops and oil seed rape on its 220 acres and varying its livestock between cattle and pigs.

“My father came here in 1947,” says Bill. “The only livestock we have these days is a small flock of 50 Lleyn X ewes that are really there to mow the grass.

“Our son Michael went into the seed industry with local merchants Campbell & Penty, he also travelled the world before coming back here to help with our diversification plans and the caravan site was his idea.’

“We developed the buildings into two bed and breakfast units and made them fully spec’d for disabled.”

Michael’s efforts over a five-year period were not sufficient to keep him at home.

“He wanted to buy a house but with the housing market being as it is he moved out to Australia. He is now a resident, has citizenship and works on a stud farm where recently two of the runners in the Melbourne Cup had been bred from their yard.”

Bill is positive about the impact their new businesses have had on himself and Sue.

“Gone are the days when you would only speak to anyone other than your own family when you went to a livestock market.

“We talk with people every day whether they are staying here at the bed and breakfast rooms, stopping on the caravan site, fishing on the lake or going around the cross country course.”

A passion for horses

Bill and Sue currently have 16 horses including a racehorse that they bought for their daughter Louise and son-in-law Matt following his recovery from a serious operation last year.

Sue has high hopes for Doyen whose breeding follows that of the unbeaten Frankel. So if you’re thinking of taking your horse on holiday it could be in very good company.