'They've done their job, and sometimes they just need a good retirement'

Forgotten, maybe, but not gone. Here they are – Cool Bathwick, Elegant Olive, Wake Board, Little Rococoa and their friends, safe and sound, happy and healthy, long after their names vanished from the racecard, from our consciousness, from our conscience.

This happens to horses all the time. We notice the big names go, we keep an eye out for dispatches from their new lives, but the other ranks disperse in anonymity like a demobbed army, out through the racecourse gates and away. Where do they go? Some of the lucky ones end up here, in a little patch of horse heaven in the shadow of the Malvern hills, at The Racehorse Welfare Centre with mother-and-daughter team Lee and Sian Morse.

The Racehorse Welfare Centre is a sanctuary for racehorses who are unsuited to any of the many second careers available to their brethren, from polo to dressage, from horseball to eventing. It's the end of the line, the sunset home – and as all nine residents put their heads over their doors in an act of equine choreography the thought occurs that without TRWC their futures would be uncertain at best, unlikely at worst.