Who Keeps This

My name is Nell Iredale and I have spent most of my working life around breeding and racing yards, first as a stud groom and later in a broader role that has never had a tidy job title, somewhere between yard manager and general dogsbody. I write this diary from a yard near Malton, North Yorkshire, mostly for my own record-keeping, and it turns out other people who spend their lives around horses like reading it too.

This is not the site of a working stud or a trading business. I don't sell horses, I don't offer liveries, and nothing here is a pitch for anything. It is a personal diary about the actual, day-to-day texture of breeding and racing horses, written because most of what gets written about this world online is either marketing or completely disconnected from what the work is actually like, and I got tired of both.

I started keeping notes properly during my second foaling season, mostly because I kept forgetting what had worked the previous year, and the notes gradually turned into something closer to a diary, and then, eventually, into this. If you have a question about something I've written, or a disagreement with it, the honest answer is that I would genuinely like to hear it. Write in and I will read it, even if I don't always have time to reply properly.