It’s all I know. What else could I do?” Noel Wilson is getting serious. “The horses are all I want to know. I am happier here in the yard with the horses than at the races.

“I’m a horseman. I’m 45 and I have got time on my side and I will give it 120 per cent to make sure the business survives and I keep training horses. It’s all I want to do.”

Five years ago, when The Press launched its first Turf Talk column – on July 6, 2007 – Wilson was the jocular Irishman with the bright future.

Having waited patiently, the trainer, who had been a leading amateur rider for 20 years and had worked for the likes of Mel Brittain, had finally moved into a brand new yard at Sandburn, in Flaxton.

Around pristine barns and a state-of-the-art all-weather gallop, the winners were arriving as well.

Pavershooz won a valuable handicap at Musselburgh. Wilson’s fledgling operation enjoyed big days out at York.

“The first three-and-a-half years were going well,” says Wilson when asked what the last half decade has brought. “We were going forward. We had winners at York – Pavershooz and Demolition won a couple of big races – the old stagers were very good to us.”

Then, he confesses, he made a mistake and has been playing catch-up ever since.

The opportunity to travel to Scotland, to become the master of the Belstane Racing Stables in late 2009 in Lanarkshire, looked like one he could not resist.

There was the promise of even better facilities and, importantly for a man nursing a string of 22, more horses.

But all was not what it seemed.

“If I have got one or two regrets in my whole training career, going up to Belstane was the biggest and stupidest thing I have ever done,” Wilson reflects. “I was established, I didn’t need to go. What dragged me there was the thought of going to the next level.

“This is a numbers game. The more horses you train, the more winners you are going to train. That was the thinking behind it. I knew after six weeks that it wasn’t right. It was a matter of time before I bit the bullet. I thought ‘the longer I leave this, the harder it is going to be’.

“All the owners were very pleased when I came back to Breckenbrough. I’d looked in Malton, Middleham, and all over the place and this yard just became available at the time I was looking. We have got great facilities. We’ve got grass, a swimming pool, a spa. We’ve got everything that is needed to train horses.”

Breckenbrough, the former home of the Ramsden training empire just outside Sandhutton, near Thirsk, is where he has been based since his return from the north.

Although many owners remained loyal, times have been tough. Crucially, Wilson hasn’t stopped dreaming.

“It has been hard and slow,” he said. “We have had to start, basically, from scratch again. We have a lot of new owners, some fresh horses, and it is going to be a work in progress. I am going to have to work really hard to get back to where I was.

“We were training more than 20 winners a season, from about 22 horses, and we will get there again. We have got seven or eight winners this year and, if I can hit 20-plus, we are getting the best out of what we have got.

“We have always proved that. If there’s a race in a horse, we have always got it out of it. What I need are the Saturday horses. That’s what we are lacking – a couple of Saturday horses to go to York and Doncaster.

“It would be nice to go to the sales with £100,000 and buy the horse you want, or a couple, but that investment is not here. This job is a dream. You have to keep dreaming. It might be round the corner. You never know who you are going to meet or who will come and see this place.

“These have been the hardest six months of my training career. We have horses bursting to run and we need a bit of chance with the weather. We are entering, declaring and pulling out. I haven’t got enough horses to just keep running them.

“I have to look after what I have got and I need everything to be 100 per cent for the day they go to the races.

“Most of the horses I have – there’s a race in them. They might not win two or three but there’s a win there. I have to get things in their favour.

“We have got the ammunition to win the races when everything is right for them.”

For the fiercely ambitious Wilson, the set-backs have been hard to take. Standing still was never his plan. But what adversity has brought is new determination – a steely desire to achieve his ambitions despite the odds.

“The business is strong enough,” he explains.

“The only thing I am disappointed in is that I haven’t moved forward at the pace I would have liked to have done. I would dearly have loved to be training 50 or 60 horses by now and having a couple of good Saturday horses.

“I know we have the ability to train them if we have got them. We can mix it with the best if the horse is good enough. But that’s what drives me forward – to get to that level. I have to keep the business afloat. I have got loyal owners and we just need some fresh faces in the place. I’m working hard to get that.”