My wife is into horses and for as long as we’ve been married and she’s been living in Donegal, which is 15 years, she’s been talking about getting some resemblance of a sand arena built so that there is somewhere safe for her to ride and exercise her horse.

I thought I’d done well converting an old shed into stables for her, but I’d always managed to deflect the sand arena situation.

But now my eldest and middle daughter are both into horses as well, so that means that there is three of them torturing me.

Three against one just simply isn’t fair and I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.

Put off

I also seem to keep losing my Jeep once or twice a week so that they can bring the horses to someone else’s sand arena, so I may just have to give in and try to construct something as cheaply as possible.

As an easy-going friend once told me "why do today, what you can put off to tomorrow”, so I think the sand arena will have to wait until the spring - which spring I’m not sure.

Anyway, there’s a more pressing stand-off in progress. I’m being told that the horses just can’t stand in the stable all day for another winter, it’s bad for their joints, etc. And I’m saying they’re not being turned out to the fields to wreck the place, so what do we do?

Don’t worry folks, divorce is not on the cards - not yet any way. Dawn has come up with a plan that we both agree on.

Courtyard

The yard that the stables are in is not our main farmyard. There are some old unused buildings that would have traditionally been stables, loose boxes and cow byres.

Some of these buildings, which are right beside the stables, form an L shape and, along with some trees on the other side, form a bit of a courtyard situation.

Some of the old loose boxes don’t have roofs anymore, but are open fronted, so if you take the courtyard piece plus the loose boxes, there is a reasonable size of an area - a lot bigger than the stables anyway.

So, the master plan is to gather up a few gates and a few bits of D-rail that are already lying around the yard and fence off an all-weather turn-out paddock.

The horses will have somewhere to run about during the day and still have a bit of shelter and they won’t be tramping my fields, so everyone is happy!

The next job will be to get the lights going in the stables again - the 50-year-old electric cable that brings power from one yard to the next seems to have given up the ghost!