26/08/2025
Morning team,
✨ IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT ✨
After a long hard think we have decided to turn the business back into a members ONLY club and close to the general public.
🔷This means any of our pony club members or regulars we see weekly/fortnightly will still get lessons if experienced enough to become a sharer of one of the ponies. (❕❕If I haven’t managed to speak to you directly about this yet then please drop me a message asap - it’s not intentional just been a lot on!❕❕).
🔷 Closing to the general public means we will NOT be doing any beginner lessons/hacks , people who just want to try it out or for one off rides, holiday pony camp days, pony party’s etc. The small selection of services we continue to provide will be on the website.
Before we moved to West Linton we were a small business & members only club, after the move we have hit the ground running at 100mph in the depth of winter turning into a riding school and a livery yard it was a huge success & it really has been amazing all the clients we have built up over the past 7 months and for that we are VERY grateful - a huge , HUGE thank you to all!!🙏🏽🩵
There’s been a few reasons for this decision;
🦄 our golden oldie ponies are retiring and we have decided not to buy in new ponies to replace them for the school but instead fill the stables with livery’s and move the ponies back to our Balerno site to live out their days peacefully and to have little humans share them to keep loving on them/ticking them over as they love the attention!
🦄 Our working ponies and horses staying at WL are not for beginners , they are more advanced and we are now looking for kids who are serious about the sport and want to progress in their riding journey - if you commit to us / the horses , we will commit to training and supporting you in any way we can! We want to see our working ponies/sharers out competing or just having fun!
🦄 We want to scale back the number of services provided to level up the quality of the service we continue to provide - this will free up so much more staff time!
🦄 We want to focus on the livery yard side of the business & become more of a training facility hosting clinics , getting some brilliant coaches in to teach and host competitions throughout the year.
🦄 Both myself & Alison have now worked 7 days a week (a lot of 7-7 days!) for nearly 5 years now and as much as we have LOVED every minute of it, it’s not something we can do long term. As most of you know our body’s & minds have been totally exhausted/burnt out recently and we have either been injured/off sick - we have to put our physical health first & have some sort of personal life again. We are finding a healthy work/life balance!
We hope you can all understand & appreciate where we are coming from. Again a massive thank you to all our clients old, new and current - it means the world to us to have had your support over the years!
You will still see both of us around a lot as I’ll be based at West Linton and Alison will be based at Balerno & if you ever want to pop in to say hello to the retired ponies to give them cuddles / carrots , drop us a message as we will never say no!! 🥰🥕
If you think you want to be become a member & join our fun/friendly little horsey family here at V&C then please drop me a DM for all info ✨🤩
Lots of love ,
Vanessa & Alison
Team V&C x
