Stuart Coltherd happy to be juggling horses, lambs and cows during racing'shutdown

No one knows when racing will emerge from its enforced shutdown. But Stuart Coltherd is getting ready for the start of a new season next week.

The Borders handler juggles training 25 horses with looking after 1,100 sheep and 70 cows on his farm near Selkirk.

Jockey son Sam, 21, has returned home from West Yorkshire, where he’s based with Grand National-winning trainer Sue Smith, to help out with lambing season.

It’s a real family affair, with Stuart’s wife Lesley and daughters Amy, 22, and Milly, 18, also mucking in.

For the last couple of years, Stuart and Sam have had the added pressure of readying stable star Captain Redbeard for a crack at the National.

But with no racing on the horizon, and many of his fellow trainers facing an uncertain financial future, Coltherd is relieved to have a second profession to fall back on.

He said: “We’ll be flat out for the next six to eight weeks. And that’s without any racing.

“Lambing season is pretty much 24/7 and sleep will be in short supply for the next wee while.

“I’m used to juggling the horses and the farming at this time of year, so it’ll actually seem quite quiet for a change.

“In the last couple of years, as we’ve got busier with the horses, I’d half thought about scaling back on the numbers of sheep even further. At our busiest, we had another 300.

“But I’m glad we didn’t cut back, because they’re what’s going to keep us going for the next few months.

“I feel for a lot of trainers in Scotland, because most of them rely solely on horses as a business. It’s at times like this when I feel lucky to have the farm to fall back on.

“Sam’s come back up the road from Sue’s to help out because there’s obviously not much else he can do just now.

“Milly works for a local security firm but, like everywhere else, they’re shut as well.

“I can remember the kids, Sam and Amy in particular, wrestling with lambs from pretty much the day they could walk.

“They all know the drill and it will make it easier having them here to help out.”

Coltherd’s flock will deliver around 1,800 lambs – and most of those will arrive in the first fortnight.

He added: “The gestation period for ewes is five months, so if you put out the tups on November 5 then your season will pretty much start bang on April 1.

“It’s always a bit colder up here in the hills, so we usually hold off with the tups for another week or so in November.

“That’s actually been quite helpful in the last two Aprils when we had Captain Redbeard going for the National.

“The first fortnight of the season is the busiest. We start off lambing 750 Scotch Mules, which are a cross between a Bluefaced Leicester and a Scottish Blackface.

“They ewes usually produce anything from one to three lambs, although many will have two.

“We bring them into the sheds just before they’re about to lamb. We know which ones will be first thanks to a very simple system.

“Before the tups go out to mate, we put a harness on them that has a wee container of paint fitted to it. When they mount the ewes, it leaves a paint mark on the ewes’ coats.

“We use red paint for the first week, blue for the second and so on. That way we know which ewes to bring into the sheds and when.

“After the Mules are done, we’ll tend to the 350 Scotch Blackies we keep up in the Yarrow Valley. They’re a breed of hill sheep, so they’re much better suited to that wilder terrain.”

Coltherd is keeping eight horses on the go in case of a swift restart to racing behind closed doors.

The social-distancing measures that are now in force across locked-down Britain have come easier to him than the rest of us.

He quipped: “As farmers, we’ve been self-isolating for years!

“We have another two lads who work for us but, with a few tweaks, we’ve been able to carry on pretty much as normal.”