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Jun 28

Jun 28 Grand Designs - Creating the perfect training centre

MY PARTNER, John Spouse, and I moved to Château Gassard near Saint Samson in 2012. Why? I had started training in Spain, firstly in Mijas and then Madrid, before moving to Haras de Bouquetot in Normandy in 2009. Prior to this I had worked with show jumpers, hunters and racehorses, working for employers and latterly running my own business. Haras de Bouquetot had been the perfect yard to start my training career in France but following management/ownership changes, it was put on the market. After a great season I had a rush of blood to the head and decided to invest in property rather than continue to pay rent. I also enjoy the lifestyle and, having learnt the language, I felt the time was right to build on my experiences from Spain and from Haras de TRAINING Bouquetot and create my ‘perfect’ training centre. Location is absolutely vital in France. It’s a big place and being based in Normandy, there are always great places for sale but many of those I saw were just too isolated. The need to be close to a good road network without stressing the horses by having to travel long distances down winding country lanes to and from the races was paramount. Château Gassard was absolutely stunning: a beautiful old house in need of renovation and more than 43 hectares of gently rolling land which lent itself perfectly to my vision. Next to a fairly major road with easy access to the A13 autoroute to Paris and 15km from the busy city of Caen with its shopping malls, restaurants, and port, which has daily sailings to the UK. Conveniently, we are only 26km from gallops at Deauville racecourse – and the seafood there is sensational! The lay of the land was ideal for the development I had in mind. The area we chose for the building was flat; it could be drained and it lay perfectly within the plot with the paddocks and gallops around it. Buying property in France is different to the UK but it went pretty smoothly and I found the Société Générale Bank in Caen extremely supportive and their support has been ongoing through the difficult first year. It is imperative to get sound advice from good French accountants and someone who knows the peculiarities of the French legal and tax system. We looked at a lot of yards and noted down points we liked but over the years as I worked and trained in different places I had created a vision of how careful placement of the installations can allow the daily routine of a stable to flow easily. Eventually I decided that to reach the standard I wanted, I needed to start from scratch. The excellent estate agency, France Equestre, had shown me one stable previously occupied by the show jumper Rodrigo Pessoa, with everything under one roof and I fell in love with that concept. My brother, who had been in the family construction business, drew up the original plans, which I tweaked until I was happy. I kept asking him what was possible and he said, “We put a man on the moon in the 1969 so everything is possible!” We designed a building with three spans – 30 metres, 20 metres and 30 metres. The length of the building is 60 metres. One span contains 10 quarantine boxes with outside outlook, hay and feed store, and indoor school. The central span is feed house, tack room, laboratory, wash room, eight staff apartments, and offices. The third span contains 57 stables, of which 20 have an outside outlook through openable Monarch windows – the horses love looking out and watching the world go by. I do believe these small points help keep the horses happier. We put in roof lights throughout, which are also insulated, and electric strip lighting where needed. The height of the building is important, much more so than the pitch of the roof. Too low and it is not healthy for the horses. Too high and it is too cold. We have height of five metres at the rafters and seven metres at the central point. We chose Kingspan panels, which are two metal sheets sandwiched with three-inch foam insulation to stop any condensation and keep out the winter cold and the heat in summer. They lend themselves very well to equine installations because they stop any problems that occur with the heat rising from the horses meeting the cold roof. The stable block is lovely and cosy in the winter and super cool on hot summer days. The indoor school is invaluable for breaking and backing the babies and for the Normandy weather. The Activ-track, the same as the gallops, performs very well indoors and we have no dust and no need for watering. I then purchased the sectional pieces of the buildings in a kit form and found another company to erect them. It sounds scary, but I would recommend that anyone looking to build a large building investigate this approach carefully rather than handing everything over to one firm. I did employ a French advisor to help me negotiate a lot of good discounts with local building suppliers, which I couldn’t have done alone. I also spent a day at a plant machinery auction, purchasing diggers, compactors, “The height of the building is important, much more so than the pitch of the roof. Too low and it is not healthy for the horses. Too high and it is too cold” dumper trucks, cherry pickers, and other pieces of equipment – a slightly different experience to the equine sales! This was invaluable as the purchase price of the equipment outweighed long periods of plant rental costs, and I still have the equipment to sell. Once the build was in progress it seemed to come on in leaps and bounds – no doubt due the style of the building chosen – and it was from piles of girders and metal sheets to a building within a month. For the internal stable fittings we plumped for a high quality product as this is the showcase for the business, so it needed to look good and it certainly does. We used Monarch stable fronts and breeze blocks for the dividing walls to make 30 boxes of 3m x 3m and 27 boxes of 3.5m x 3m, rendering them with a lime mix as this has antiseptic properties. This was a very cost- effective option. I also used the Monarch swivel mangers for ease of use and cleaning using th front opening shoots to feed hay through. This does save an enormous amount of time and is safer for everyone. I like water drinkers with the push attachment for each stable as opposed to the plate ones to ensure that the horses constantly get clean, fresh running water because there is a chance of bacterial growth in the latter. I absolutely did not want any drains running under the barns so ours were channeled on the outside. In Mijas, we had drains running under the barns and I believe they were great harbourers of bacteria sitting right under the horses’ noses. Closing this huge area up warmly and securely gave me a bit of headache. I dithered on the external barn doors prior to installing insulated roller shutter doors, which were an expensive option but have worked brilliantly. These are the main doors to the barn and being insulated they keep the barn warm and draught free and are really convenient to use – a great success. We designed the quarantine block away from the main yard allowing me to keep new horses isolated, and it is also used for horses out of training. I kept the hay barns away from the horses and closed off from the main barn. I invested in the Haygain hay steamers and all of our hay is “The Activ-track has a lot of rubber in it, which makes it very springy and forgiving. This past winter we used it in temperatures of -10oC with no problems” steamed before it enters the main barn area. We had initial teething problems with respiratory issues and the Irish Equine Centre were fantastic in helping me resolve these. They took swabs and air samples from all over the barn and tested the all hay and feed. From these results and on their advice we changed the ventilation in the barn, raising the centre of the roof and adding ventilation holes in the upper sheets, which helped create a good air circulation in the roof area above the horses. Since then, we have not looked back. Thinking back, I should have got them involved at the planning stage, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Finally, paddocks are vital to the way I train and their layout was planned around the main barn. I used a single thick rail with tornado high tensile wire as we had used a similar fence at Haras de Bouquetot, reducing the paddock injuries the horses had previously suffered from slipping under and through the traditional post and rail fencing. We put in paddocks of around 1.2 hectares (3 acres), which I find a good size for groups of four turnout horses. They are turned out purely for exercise and recreation whilst in training and this size gives enough space for them to move around freely and get out of each other’s way if they want to. I strongly believe in keeping them in the most natural way I can and this is a really important part of the ethos of my training regime. The fillies and geldings normally settle in small groups and we have ‘buddy’ paddocks for the colts where they can see, but not touch, each other. In the barn I wanted to replicate as much of the herd mentality as I could, planning the layout accordingly. Then the all important gallops. We decided upon the Martin Collins Activ-track surface as I had previously used Softtrack but found it too firm for training – it also froze at -1oC. The Activ-track has a lot of rubber in it, which makes it very springy and forgiving, and it has a lower freezing temperature. This past winter we used it in temperatures of -10oC with no problems. Martin Collins came and planned the gallop with us, advising on the layout and all important drainage, making the best of the natural gradients. We designed a 500-metre round canter with a 200-metre hill canter off one shoot, and a 1,110-metre long gallop off another. I have used a straight gallop in the past and found the horses get stressed and can start to nap when turning round for their second canter. One gallop has both a right- and left- hand bend as I feel it is very important for horses to turn well. We also incorporated different gradients throughout including a small downhill stretch, as the premier Paris racecourses all have a downhill section. Sometimes it is easy to keep going uphill and forget horses need to learn to balance themselves downhill as well. We built a long walkway around the outside of the property for the horses to walk round and relax on the way home and we have made use of the hills to create decent inclined walk and trot paths. We incorporated an eight-horse Claydon horse walker close to the barn for ease of use. I flinched a bit at the cost of the roof for it then got my builders to make a bespoke one. To be honest, though, I think it took about the same time and cost the same in the end so I probably should have just written the cheque to Claydon. I did look at all sort of ‘green’ options from biomass boilers to solar heating but felt that the technology, particularly with the biomass boilers and the use of equine waste, was not quite perfected enough to invest in. Budget-wise, we did OK! We did go over by 25% because the depth of concrete we needed for the base of the barn was underestimated and we had a few issues with our first group of constructors (who got into financial difficulty and relieved me of some cash), so we had to go back cap in hand to the Société Générale. Fortunately they were supportive. So, I have created my little piece of heaven on earth and enjoy working daily with my relaxed bunch of horses so much that I ALMOST forget the old adage: “Take what you want and then pay for it!”

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THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN - EUROPEAN TRAINER - ISSUE 42

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