Wednesday, October 3, 2012

TREC Horse Competition

Over the weekend of 21-23 September we ran a British Horse Society TREC competiton at Burrow Farm. This competition is made up of three phases, on the Saturday the riders go out on an orienteering route with one class for Level 2 riders riding 17km and the Level 3 riders 27km. On the Sunday their riding skills are tested and then all the scores are added to find the winner. We ran the competition in aid of the equine charity Brooke and at the Saturday evening social which was held in Wootton Courtenay village hall  Petra Ingram the CEO for Brooke gave a talk outlining its work. Competitors travelled from as far as Co Durham, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Kent and Surrey. Hilary Barnard from Bristol the reigning GB  Level 4 TREC Champion entered our event and came second with her pony Harvey in the L3 class (see photo overlooking the Bristol Channel and Minehead). Despite the rain on the Sunday everyone seemed to have a good time and Rob and I received many emails thanking us for the competition.

Summer and the Barn

Where has the summer gone. I seem to have spent most of this summer stressed out with rain and haymaking. It seems we never managed more than three days at a time without drizzle and mist and a local Somerset person described it as 'mizzle'. We managed to make hay during the one good hot week in July and then not again until the middle of September, in between we just made haylage. Now we have so much hay and small bale haylage it has filled up half of the barn! It's a good job we got planning permission to put on a side extension which has now been completed, otherwise we would have ended up putting all the equipment outside for the winter which would not have been a very good idea.