my father concentrated on the agricultural sector, drawing beet and hauling a lot of barley for Guinness and the local company, WB Nunn. They were taken over after that but we still work for them, but the agricultural aspect of it is only part of what we do now. We still draw harvest and grain but we switched over to construction when it was flying, hauling sand and gravel and concrete. “The construction sector is on its knees now so I suppose we’ll have to switch again! Over the last few years we’ve also got involved in buying and selling decorative stone through Castle Stone, and that now forms a good part of the business.” J & K Ormonde Haulage Ltd’s Castle Stone arm aims to provide low cost, low maintenance but highly attractive stone and bark mulch products for various gardening and landscaping purposes, from driveways to paths to flowerbeds. Both an importer and an exporter, Castle Stone sources the highest quality decorative stone in both Ireland and the UK. “We’re a stone merchant and we source a lot of stone in the UK for people here,” says James. “People who want decorative stone might have
a limited choice in their immediate locality, or might not know the best place to get it, so I sort it out for them either by sourcing it here or importing from the UK.” While the company’s UK business forms a crucial part of its overall workload, James does not envisage a scenario whereby they would concentrate even greater energy on the export market in the coming years. “It’s a good segment of the business, we have one or maybe two trucks in the UK every week so it probably makes up 15 or 20 per cent of the work these days,” he says. “That work in the UK is high-spec job, it’s not the run of the mill stuff, and it’s ticking along, still hanging in there at the moment. It’s stayed at approximately the same level for the last five or six years so I’m not sure I’d see it expanding a huge amount in the coming years.” As a trading name of J&K Ormonde Haulage Ltd, the haulage company’s fleet of vehicles serve all of Castle Stone’s needs, assisting in keeping the company’s overheads to a minimum and in turn ensuring that they are best placed to answer every customer’s decorative stone
requirements. Castle Stone can deliver a huge variety of load sizes, from under one tonne to a maximum of 28 tonnes. The company has also developed an indepth website, www.castlestone.ie, where potential customers can accurately estimate the amount of stone required for their specific project using the Tonnage Calculator. Another wing of the J & K Ormonde Haulage Ltd operation has seen it answer the needs of a range of clients in the equestrian industry in recent years. In common with many sectors of the economy over the past two years, the horse-racing and breeding industries have been hit hard by the credit crunch, but the need for investment in top-of-the-range training facilities remains pressing. To that end, J & K Ormonde Haulage Ltd provides the solution for sourcing and delivering quality Wexford sand for use on allweather sand gallops and equestrian arenas throughout Ireland. For more information on the products and services offered by either J & Ormonde Haulage Ltd or Castle Stone, call the company at 0539136136 or check out www.castlestone.ie.
The Castle Stone division has become an important subsidiary to the J & K Ormonde Haulage collective in recent years
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IRISH TRUCKER & LIGHT COMMERCIALS