This summer has been a very busy one and despite the weather we had, we have had a very successful camp week, as well as busy activity days and no end of new riders.

Talking to the children and their parents at the beginning of the holidays about the yard rules really paid off.  No children were left without checking first that they had a responsible adult on site that was prepared to look after them.  This meant we were aware of the number of children on site, and the children were far more helpful as they were working alongside the adults and so behaved very well.

We decided to run the summer holidays this year with one week of activities alternating with one week of normal term time evening lessons.   This worked quite well, but is always hard to judge due to so many people being on holiday.  Claire, Helen and I taught private lessons and assessment lessons with new riders daily, running them alongside activities or in the daytime when the other lessons were in the evenings.

Camp was held from Monday 17^th – Friday 21^st August.  We had a total of 57 riders booked in, some for just one or two days and lots of others for the whole week.  We had several children book in for just one day and enjoyed it so much that they stayed for the rest of the week!  Rachel Williams and I worked together to work out the busy timetable and the shuffling of ponies to children, this took some doing!   But all ran very well each day.  Rachel worked very well in the kitchen and her meals were appreciated by all.

All of our school ponies were used every day during camp, and it got to the point where we had to turn children away.

The picnic rides proved to be very popular.  I took four of them over the six week holiday; we had over 10 riders on each ride and were out for 5 hours each time.  The lunches provided by Rachel Williams were very good.

Trifec’s Open Show on August Bank Holiday Monday ran smoothly despite the wet start to the day.  I was a bit disappointed with the number of outside competitors, but very pleased with the amount of support we had from the Trifec liveries and the ‘Loan Pony’ children did everything!!

Helen Johns and Rachel Arnold have both found new full time jobs; they have both worked very hard this summer and will be missed.  Both however still want to work on the weekends, and Helen would like to continue teaching for us.

More updates from me again soon.

Beccy Field
Triley Fields Equestrian Centre Manager & Instructor