'All of us who ply our trade training horses are dreamers - to put so much into it you must have a dream'

There’s an argument to be made that, pound for pound, the town of Trim in County Meath could be the finest seedbed of ambition that Ireland has ever produced.

For instance, the castle that still dominates the townscape is not just an ordinary ‘common or garden’ castle – it just happens to be the largest one built by the Norman invaders when they first arrived on the island in the 12th century. The family that built it went on to experience fame and infamy in equal measures too. Roger Mortimer, one of its more notorious members, famously seduced the French wife of King Edward II before deposing and then cruelly dispatching the hapless monarch. Mortimer has been described by historians as not just an ordinary traitor, but "England’s greatest traitor, ever".

And that’s before we even get to the racehorses. Lying a short distance to the west of the town is Capranny Stud, the place from where a more recent son of Meath first seeded his own ambition. It was from Capranny that a young Gordon Elliott sent Silver Birch to Aintree in 2007 to win the Grand National and to proclaim loudly that yet another inhabitant of Trim had joined the fray.