Owner of expanding South Ribble equestrian centre seeks to share her love of horses with the community
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Jasmine Gleave has been granted permission to build a new competition-sized indoor equestrian arena at her base at Fleetwood Hall Farm.
The facility will enable her to offer weatherproof and modern surroundings for the dressage training and stabling service which she currently provides to horse-owners – as well as somewhere to prepare for the competitions which she enters herself. A condition of the planning approval means that the site cannot host its own equestrian events.
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Hide AdHowever, Jasmine says that in the longer-term, she hopes that the enlarged business will be able to partially subsidise a scheme which would allow the wider community to get up close with the creatures she has been surrounded with all her life.
“People who live in inner-city environments would rarely get to see what happens behind the scenes at a professional yard – so I’d like to be able to open it up and bring together a real mix of people,” Jasmine explained.
“I’m hoping that there’ll be a riding academy so that people can afford to come and learn here.
“Horses can be massively therapeutic and I think a lot of people don’t get that. They very much feed off your personal energy and give a lot back to you – they are very sensitive and in tune and it’d be nice for people to experience that.
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Hide Ad“If you have had any kind of personal trauma, they can be very gentle and quiet in that moment – and you get so much peace from it that I don’t think you can get anywhere else.”
For now, however, Jasmine’s focus is on growing the business before she can get the community venture out of the stalls.
South Ribble Borough Council’s planning committee gave the go-ahead for the scheme, which also includes an outdoor manege and a new stabling block which will allow for an increase in the 20 horses currently housed at the site.
Planning officer Steven Brown told the virtual meeting where the decision was made that the application had demonstrated the “very special circumstances” required to permit building in the greenbelt – and was, in any case, compliant with local and national policies allowing for development of appropriate facilities for outdoor recreation in such an area.
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Hide Ad“It provides the ability to exercise horses in the winter and potentially remove them from the highway network. Given the remoteness and screening around [the location], we consider, on balance, that it doesn’t impact on openness,” Mr. Brown said.
Twenty letters were received in support of the proposal, but Graham Young, chair of Samlesbury and Curedale Parish Council, said that he had been made aware of local concerns about the impact of the development on traffic.
“We don’t want to hold them back… but we got quite a lot of letters explaining that [people] didn’t want a lot more large horse vehicles on the roads,” Mr. Young said.
However, the meeting heard that the condition banning competitions – coupled with the fact that the horses are looked after by staff and are visited by their owners only once or twice a week – meant that little extra traffic would be generated as a result of the expansion.
Jasmine said she was grateful that committee members ha embraced her plans with "so much enthusiasm"
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