Latest news with #Langholm
BBC News
16-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Langholm horse racing trainer James Ewart heads in new direction
As career changes go, it is a pretty dramatic more than 20 years as a horse racing trainer, James Ewart has decided to give up the sport to focus on his renewable energy has sent out countless winners from his yard at Langholm in the south of with a young family he said now the time was right to steer his career in a new direction. It has been a long journey in the sport for the 46-year-old and his wife Briony, who has worked alongside him at the yard."I rode in my first race when I was 16 and I rode my last race probably when I was about 24," said James."We've invested an awful lot of money in the yard, putting in really good facilities and we weren't really seeing the dividend."It's an existence living at best and the problem is that there is no certainty or security as a trainer." He said having a young family made him realise that it was time to change from a career which was "very selfish" with his hours and created a "lot of financial stress"."I think now is the time to change direction where I'm still luckily young enough that I can," he direction is renewable energy - but with a nod to his love of horse racing."I set up a company about three years ago called ESB Scotland, bizarrely enough, named after the racehorse that beat Devon Loch in the Grand National," he explained."It's a renewable energy company and we've been developing sites."They have been looking at battery storage projects and have got "quite a long way down the road" with two - one at Harker in Cumbria and another at Coalburn in South Lanarkshire. Despite the differences in the field, he said, there were some things racing could help him with in his new life."We've been learning on the job and that's probably what racing teaches you because in life, I would say, almost everybody to a certain degree learns from their failures and mistakes," he said."In racing, if you're really successful over a season of 12 months, you have a strike rate of roughly 20% - which means you lose 80% of the time."But that time losing is the time where you create winners because you learn what you need to do."He said it was "exactly the same" in many walks of life, including renewable energy with its planning and connection applications."It's peculiarly complicated and you keep bashing away and you learn from your failures," he said."If one option doesn't work, you look at another option, so I guess resilience is probably what racing has taught us." Among the highlights of his career was getting four winners on one day at two different courses which he described as "quite good".Nice horses like Sa Suffit, Quicuyo and Aristo du Plessis are another fond memory along with breaking the track record at Doncaster with Beneficial said: "We enjoyed every winner, you know, it's a way of life, isn't it?"It's very pleasurable training in the morning, doing the work and seeing the horses, building relationships with staff and with the owners."Those are all the best parts of the game aren't they?"And there's some wonderful, wonderful people in racing - wonderful characters, really talented individuals." He said some of the staff at the yard would now go to work for other trainers and others were going although he is turning his back on the sport, he said his experience had been a positive one."It's a fantastic sport, I love it to bits," he said."The truth was, if I didn't have to make a decision I would be staying where I am."Probably quite selfishly, if I hadn't got a little boy Jack, I would be still training because you could live that hand to mouth existence."
BBC News
13-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
'Lifeline' post office returns to town after six years
A full-time post office service has returned to a town in the south of Scotland after nearly six main post office shut at the end of 2019 and it was left with a part-time outreach service in the town hall for its 2,000 or so thanks to Elizabeth and Kelvin Wilson - who moved to the town four years ago - the "lifeline" service has now will operate out of The Paper Shop and be open to the public for 60 hours a week. Elizabeth said she was well aware of the implications for local residents after the loss of the service and the couple had jumped at the chance to bring a full-time service back."We were on holiday last year and we got an email asking if we were interested in opening up a post office," she said."We just decided to go for it from then. The whole community has been totally behind us." She said it would save on travel for people wanting to use the service and hopefully also provide a meeting point too."There are quite a lot of aged people in the town and they don't want to go travelling to Carlisle," she said."For me it was a no-brainer, it was what the community needed. It is quite a tight-knit community, everybody looks after everyone."In The Paper Shop, you kind of realise that it is a meeting hub. For some people, we might be the only person that a person sees in a day." Solicitor Cassie Murdoch said it would make a big difference to the area."First of all, for the business, it is going to be so useful - just for paying in things and sending larger parcels that we can't fit through the post box," she said."Just having that service available every day again will make such a difference." That view was echoed by local café owner Nicole Beattie."We opened two years ago and we really struggle with our banking," she said."It means travelling to Carlisle a lot of the time which means that we don't have a daily service."So having something that's available every day in Langholm is going to make everything so much easier." Katherine Latimer - of Latimer's of Langholm, a furniture shop which has traded in the town for more than a century - said many of their customers still used post as their main method of said it would end the "absolute nightmare" of trying to post items out to new service is available from 07:00 to 17:00 on weekdays, 07:00 to 13:00 on Saturday and 07:00 to 11:00 on Office area change manager, Samuel Williams, said he was "delighted" to see a full-time branch return to said that the Post Office was grateful to the outreach service which operated in the town hall over the past six years.
