Ten years ago today saw the final meet held at Kent's last remaining horse racing course, bringing to an end more than a century of history.

Reporter Rhys Griffiths took a stroll around the abandoned track this week and spoke to the woman who lost her "dream job" when the site was mothballed...

For just the briefest of moments her voice catches, and she has to compose herself ever so slightly.

"You've got me choking up," says the last general manager of Folkestone racecourse, recalling the track's emotional final days a decade ago.

Emma Santer grew up around horses; her grandfather Jesse Santer was an amateur jockey and the sport of kings was always part of family life, all of which meant that in 2003 the chance to work in the industry was simply a dream come true.

But it was an opportunity that arose only after she had suffered serious injuries in a riding accident.

"I've always been interested in and brought up around racehorses," she explained.

"I actually got the job because I got made redundant from a previous role when I broke my back falling off a racehorse.

"The day I went back to work they made me redundant, which was nice, but I ended up working at Folkestone. Sometimes these things happen for a reason, don't they?

"If I had won the lottery I'd have done it for nothing - it was a dream job really. I lived two miles away, took my dog to work and we had an amazing team."

Opened in 1898, the Folkestone track may not have hosted the cream of the nation's racing fixtures, but for decades it built a loyal following and by the summer of 2012 was the only place in Kent where punters (and the bookies too) could enjoy at day at the races.

The course employed nine permanent staff - led by Emma, who today is head of commercial at Bromley Football Club - and it hosted more than 20 meetings every year.

On a race day as many as 150 people might be working at the track, many on a casual basis, so these events were an important fixture in the Kentish calendar and valuable to the local economy.

Folkestone was a popular destination among fans and riders alike, staging both National Hunt and flat racing meetings on its oval-shaped course.

But despite bumper crowds for special meetings, like family days and live music events, average attendance was about 1,600 per fixture - ranking the track at 50 of 60 UK racecourses in 2009 according to owner Arena Racing Company (ARC).

Emma and her team, right until the last, had been working on plans to revamp the course that would have seen the facilities refreshed and more than 800 homes built on the site.

Owners ARC - whose non-executive chairman at the time was Lord Howard of Lympne, the former Conservative party leader and MP for Folkestone and Hythe - said building the houses on the east of the site would finance a new racecourse at the southern end with new stables, grandstand areas and hospitality boxes.

But the scheme was rejected and the closure of the track - announced in the summer of 2012 and initially hoped to be temporary - came as a bitter blow to all involved in running the course.

"One of the team had been there 33 years and was one of the best fence-builders in the country," Emma said.

"It was a really, really nice place to work.

"Everybody worked really hard even when they found out in July that the racecourse was closing. No one was off sick, no one came in late, no one left early.

"They wanted it to be as perfect as it always was, right up until the last day. So it was quite hard on the last day to actually take their keys off them and watch everyone go.

"The last meeting was December 18, and then we actually all left on December 21, and I remember it really vividly because it was a really bright, crisp, sunny cold day, and driving down that racecourse drive for the last time as racecourse manager was really hard."

Although offered a new role at the Lingfield course in Surrey, Emma believed it just wouldn't be the same as Folkestone and she left the racing world altogether.

She is adamant that it was the people at Folkestone, both the staff and the regular race-goers, that made the place - and her time there - so special.

Among the highlights of the final years at Folkestone was the formation of a racing syndicate - and the purchase of a horse that would go on to write its name into the record books.

"I was going to ride in my grandad's racing colours and race," Emma recalls, "but I decided that was probably a bad idea after my accident.

"So I decided to set up a Folkestone racecourse owners group using what my grandad had taught me to look for in a race horse.

"I went and looked at some unraced two-year-olds and picked this horse that everybody said, 'you don't want that one', and I said I did.

"Long story short, he's now in the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest horse in the world, Stone of Folca.

"That's how that whole syndicate thing came about because I just thought right, if I can't ride in a race then I'm going to get a horse that we can all enjoy and then pick him using what my grandad taught me.

"So 2012 was kind of bitter-sweet really. Our horse wins the dash at Epsom and then months later [Folkestone] racecourse closes."

During its 114-year existence, the site had attracted some of the sport's most famous faces, including Frankie Dettori, Tony McCoy and the Princess Royal, Princess Anne.

She was there in 1986, racing on Glowing Promise in the 3pm Leeds Amateur Riders’ Stakes.

The bookies gave her odds of 8-1, but the Queen’s second child - who was aged 36 at the time - finished third, five lengths behind winner Galesa.

Now the site of the old course is a somewhat haunting place, much of the infrastructure still in place but slowly decaying after a decade without racing or the loving care the staff once lavished upon it.

Plans for hundreds of homes may have once been rejected, but now the racecourse forms part of the land where over the next three decades thousands of houses will be built in the construction of the new Otterpool Park 'garden town'.

Andy Jarrett, managing director of the Otterpool project, says he hopes the memory of racing at Folkestone will be kept alive in the new community.

He said: "The racecourse was over 100 years of racing, so we're trying to retain whatever we can of those features.

"We will retain the grand parade where the horses were paraded, and where it does disappear off into housing areas we're going to create pocket parks where the course would have run, and then there's the naming of streets and that sort of thing."

Memories of racing may be retained in some of the fabric of the new town, but most reside in those who loved the course.

To this day Emma still gets stopped when out and about by people who used to go racing at Folkestone and remember it with great affection.

"It feels like yesterday to me," Emma said of the course's closure.

"People come up to me all the time and say what a shame it was, what a nice course it was, how they enjoyed their race meetings but don't go racing now because it's too far to go.

"It's just such a shame. Kent is a big county and it's got no racing any more."