THE brass tap appeared most emblematic as I finished up a two-and-a-half-hour walk around the Newmarket yard with Sir Mark Prescott. A small, beautifully polished piece of stables’ infrastructure; shining quietly in the corner, a beacon to the practical, inadvertently polished by a thousand hands as they watered and hosed-down the thoroughbreds of Heath House for nigh on 200 years.

Prescott is the 13th trainer to operate from the deeply atmospheric yard, everything quiet and seemingly in its place since it was built in 1832.

The intriguing Devon horseman is now the longest-serving trainer in Britain. At times, he delivers information you know he has given many times before, there’s a touch of the performer in him and he’s a relished after-dinner speaker. At other times, he spots my fascination with thoroughbreds and his eyes light up as he shares something that feels like a secret.

I watch as the horses are led out in two groups of three, with long-serving assistant William Butler close by (Butler has been with Prescott for 18 years and will take over when either Prescott or fate decides the time is right).

The second of the two groups consists of a horse returning to work after an injury, one recently gelded, and a filly who was broken late. As they canter steadily up the hill, Prescott watches and listens intently, pointing out how much thicker their wind is compared to the fitter leading trio.

Prescott has the eye of a kestrel and a brain just as sharp, he is a staunch countryman, an advocate of the working animal. He is also a man who readily admits to being much less hot-headed than he used to be. He served his apprenticeship under the infamously uncompromising Jack Waugh, of whom Prescott relays: “The greatest gift is knowledge, and he set out to train me. I remember him looking out of the window after I had only been here six weeks. I was leading a yearling, and he said, ‘Take that in and take its temperature!’ And it was 104! He said to me, ‘I can see more from 40 yards away while talking on the telephone than you can. You’ve got a long way to go.’”

Every good trainer does two canters a day, according to Prescott. The morning I arrive on the Victorian red brick yard, he had already done those two sessions on Warren Hill (one fast, one slow canter) and loaded Kirsten Rausing’s Frankel daughter Alpinista on her way to Cologne where she won her Group 1.

Few journalists get the chance to spend so much time with Prescott one-to-one, and as he talked me through his forensic thoroughbred management regime, one couldn’t help but feel the presence of not just one great trainer, but generations of them, all expert horsemen with experience spanning years at Heath House.

HS: You have trained close to 2,300 winners and keeping them right is an intrinsic part of that. You work closely with your own vets and with Newmarket Equine Hospital which has incredible diagnostic equipment including nuclear bone scanning facilities. However, breathing problems remain the second most prevalent problem for racehorses: how do you tackle that issue?

SMP: When you scope a horse, the specimen should come back like gin; if it comes back orangey or with any colour, the horse simply won’t win. I was the first person ever to scope a horse with a very clever vet called Mike Burrell at the Animal Health Trust.

We believed that respiratory disease was the most common cause of loss of form in racing, so we developed the flexible endoscope procedure.

We floundered around for a while, but we eventually got it right and got ahead of the game. Interestingly, it was always considered a racehorse issue, but when the research was done, they found even wild mountain ponies were solid with mucus.

HS: Regarding the breeding of the thoroughbred today, concerning soundness specifically, have we lost focus on soundness and durability because the commercial focus is on the speed for a mile and perhaps under the morphology of the American thoroughbred? Distance horses appear to be losing their place, even in Europe. Do you think we are losing the thoroughbred breed as we may have known it?

SMP: No, we’re not. It’s evolving all the time and always has done. When it was the four-mile heats of the 1790s and horses ran three times a day, the breed gradually changed because winning horses went to stud. When watering came in, it helped horses who struggled with the hard going; it helped horses with slacker pasterns win races they hadn’t before. Thoroughbreds are incredibly adaptable, and they change very quickly to ever-changing external factors.

HS: Other than preventing them falling out of aeroplanes, what are the most significant practical supports as a trainer you can give a thoroughbred which impact upon his soundness directly? [A yearling filly of Prescott’s named Eve Harrington, famously took a flying leap out of her flight stall onto the tarmac at Stansted. She recovered well and went on to win a seven-furlong novice race at Southwell, much to Precott’s joy].

SMP: Without doubt, not to hurry them, progress gradually, and back off when required. Also, care and attention to surfaces. The maintenance of the Warren and Long Hill gallops is meticulous. We strip-gallop it to preserve the ground. So where the horses canter today on the grass, will next have a horse on it two years to the day, so it’s used one day in two years! When I came to Newmarket, there were 35 trainers and 750 horses; now, there are 81 trainers and 2,700 horses.

The reason why we cope with the expansion is the advancement of all-weather surfaces. Otherwise, the grass wouldn’t have coped. In those days, the horses had to go on the grass. So when you were asking about soundness, Newmarket horses had to have got fit by March or the middle of April because, after that, the ground was too firm to gallop them hard, and you could only run your hard-ground horses from June to Sept – but they were much sounder.

HS: In terms of nutrition and feeding the modern thoroughbred, what is your preferred regime, how has feeding changed over your career, and what do you believe is a common mistake people make when feeding thoroughbreds at work?

SMP: I use cubes because the best scientists in the world have developed this perfectly balanced diet, and there is no way you can improve on that: it’s their life’s work and can’t be beaten. Old-time feeders may have given something that looked and smelled more delicious, but the old-fashioned science of feeding is gone now. That used to provide you with a significant edge, but now we all feed out of the same packets. The other thing I use is the very best hay possible, and for me, that means I get my hay from Canada. In terms of mistakes, I’m not sure my answer applies to trainers, but certainly, for private people, they overfeed and underwork them. Regular work must equate to the exercise regime, whether it’s a thoroughbred, warmblood, or hunt horse.

HS: What is the greatest misunderstanding people have about racehorses, do you think?

SMP: Not so much about racehorses but about animals. There is a tendency to anthropomorphise the animals and believe they think like humans, but that’s wrong.

HS: I know you have a keen interest in history, who is someone you admire greatly in terms of animal husbandry and in the evolution of racing?

SMP: In terms of husbandry, Charles Townshend [18th Century agriculturalist] bred farm animals and bred selectively on a big scale for the first time. In terms of racing, three people changed how racing is conducted: Admiral Rous, who invented and perfected the weight-for-age scale, which is virtually unchanged to this day, and on which all races and handicaps throughout the world are framed. Also, the jockey Tod Sloan, the first to ride short and who in two years changed jockeyship entirely and then there’s Martin Pipe, who did much the same thing for jumps racing.

Prescott recounts one of his favourite stories of Admiral Rous one day climbing the Newmarket grandstand steps and a lady turning to him to say, “Why Admiral Rous, you seem very cheery today, may I ask why?” “Well Madame,” he replies. “I have just gone through the next race and have discovered that I have handicapped each horse so well, that not one of them can possibly win.”

HS: Do you use the services of equine physiotherapists, acupuncturists, chiropractors or dentists?

SMP: I use a physiotherapist, and the vet does the teeth. I tend to call the physio when I feel the horse needs it, and with all what I call, ‘back people’, it can help some of the horses some of the time and not all of the horses all of the time.

Matchstick in mouth and two watches ticking, Prescott walks us past a prize possession. Hanging like big game in the walkway to the immaculate furlong-long covered ride is the framed skin of the great and undefeated St Simon; trained at Heath House by Prescott’s predecessor, renowned Victorian trainer Mathew Dawson.

HS: What facilities have you built which have made the most significant impact on your training programme?

SMP: The covered ride is the best; I’ve never seen better. I nicked a bit of land and put it in. The access to the ride makes them creep in like panthers, rather than exploding.

The covered ride is buffeted on all sides by large straw bales, one side higher than the other, to keep the horses towards the inside rail (a horse will move away from a wall it can’t see over). There is a mock starting stall to the side of the track, padded green vinyl and adjustable with a wheel.

SMP: I’m a failed Heath Robinson [famous cartoonist renowned for his elaborate whimsical machines to achieve simple objectives]. By winding a wheel, the stalls widen; they are set at 29 inches, the racecourse stalls are 27. So we’ll walk them through and close them up. So they start at 90 inches, and each day we narrow it, so they are pushing through.

At this point, Prescott bids me forward into the stalls and beckons me to put my nose upfront.

SMP: We keep on narrowing it; he walks through and out; when it’s really narrow, one day he comes through, and I stop him. I knock the bottom gate shut and give him a bit of grass, then he walks out. Once he’s got used to that, then we’ll shut the top.

Prescott has me face-to-face with him, with only a couple of inches and the top gate between us, and he begins to bang the metal making an unnerving noise.

SMP: We get him used to tap, tap, tap, and once he doesn’t blink, he’s good enough. And, you blinked both times! They’ve got to get confident.”

HS: You are a pioneer when it comes to swimming horses, the first trainer to install a pool in Britain, and you designed it yourself. Can you talk me through the training method for the pool and why it’s such an essential piece of equipment?

SMP: We swim every horse, every day. The overriding thing is calmness; the more natural you can make everything look, the better it is for them. If you can think like a horse, it helps. For instance, the change in colour of the swimming pool floor means that they see it, engage their brains and get their legs organised.

When they enter the pool area, a gate comes around behind him, and we’ll put on a webbing collar and boots, he walks up to the water and another gate closes behind him. At this point the area he’s standing in is dark and foreboding, and to him, the water in front is just a little splash, and he’s out the other side.

The deception to the horse is that he wants to go, but you can play a little trick on him; as he goes down, the bottom suddenly falls away. He’s got to be swimming before he gets around the turn.

I’ve had the pool since 1992 and there’s not a mark on it, it was once a coal-mine conveyor belt and was secured for £25 through Exchange & Mart! Most pools are a wreck, but there’s no need to have those battles. We use the pool not just for strengthening and fitness but to cool the horses down for travel. Alpinista went off to Germany this morning, we loaded her dripping wet, so she stayed cool travelling.

HS: You use a treadmill too, and with a similar principle, it has a nice light exit, so the horse wants to go forward. How do you make these pieces of kit manageable for young horses?

SMP: We teach every horse to swim within five days of him being here, and it takes five days to get your swimming certificate, that’s all. The big thing is to teach them on arrival. I used to wait until May time, but it’s rather like the army when they are first broken in.

They’ve had all these terrible things thrown at them, they’ve gone to the sales ring, they’ve been scoped, they’ve gone in horse boxes, they’ve been clipped, they’ve had long-reins, somebody has sat on them. If you say, “Go in the pool” to a big strong, cheeky colt at that stage, he says, “Anything you like! Just let me get back into my box and have a kip!” But, when you say to a big cheeky colt in May, “Go in the pool”, he says, “See if you can make me, you c**t!” There’s an entirely different attitude. So they want teaching early, five days swimming cert, five days treadmill cert. So that very early in their lives, they know what they’ve got to do. And they also grow in confidence because they find it doesn’t hurt; all of these awful things are actually fine, so they get to trust you.

HS: What in your opinion is the greatest threat to racing?

SMP: The animal rights activists. In an increasingly urban world, more and more people believe that animals think like humans, while fewer and fewer people learn enough about animals to know how they actually think. Modern people know about pets, they watch enough wildlife programmes to comprehend the wild, but have no experience or understanding of the working animal anymore, and that is our greatest challenge.

When the time came to leave, I refused to finish our conversation with retirement talk; whose business is it anyway? But in typical Prescott style, he’s a furlong ahead and, with a glint in the eye, recounts his response to what he calls, “The wolves sniffing around the bins.”

SMP: I know I shouldn’t, but I wound William up recently by bounding down the stairs in the morning and saying, “What about that, Jim Bolger! First and second in the Guineas can’t believe it!” “No,” he said, “wonderful.” To which I responded, “Quite gives you hope, just got to keep going!”