Building New facilities at The Horse Trust

The main part of our building works is to construct a new Training Centre. This building will house a small indoor arena and a fully kitted out teaching space for the various courses we run here. It will be used by Fire & Rescue crews, police officers and other first responders as well as the learners on our Level three Diploma in Equine Legislation, Welfare and Field Skills.

This new space will provide a safer and more effective training space than our current small classroom and outdoor arena. Many of the course delegates who come to us from the emergency services have little or no experience with horses and yet may well come across a terrified lose or trapped horse as part of their duties. Our courses give the knowledge, skills and importantly confidence, for these professionals to handle potentially very dangerous situations involving horses safely and with minimum stress to the horse.

The space will also be used for professional internally and externally run courses for vets, vet nurses, farriers, equine dental technicians etc.

We are also extending our barn space to allow for more of our horses to be housed overnight (and in some cases for clinical reasons during the day) in loose barn housing. So long as horses are grouped together with other animals they get on with, this method of overnight housing is far more suitable for our big arthritic boys and girls than being housed in a stable. Crucially one of these new barn spaces will be very close to our clinic allowing for the most poorly or injured to be kept comfortably very close to where the vets operate from.  Another space will be open on one side and dedicated as a roofed area for the farrier, bathing horses etc.

In addition to the extra barn space we will also be creating three new large sand paddocks. These will allow horses with various injuries and ailments to get some much needed outdoor time without being on grass, mud or concrete.

As the oldest equine charity in the world, our archive is very precious to us and much of it consists or irreplaceable paper documents that tell our history. At the moment these important items are in a building with no temperature control and that is under seemingly constant attempted attack by pests! We also have storage garages that are not fit for purpose and we are running out of office space. To this end we will be demolishing our old archive and storage buildings and putting up a new building that will have a proper archive storage room, safe and organised equipment and stock storage plus some new additional office/ meeting space.

We hope that we will come to an agreement with the local district council to allow us to add some more parking spaces too as we currently struggle to accommodate training courses on days we are open to the public and/ or have events happening in Sefton’s Barn.

This conversation is currently still ongoing…