IN October 2009, Kimberley Morton’s life was turned upside down. She was horseriding in a menage near the family farm at Polstead, near Nayland, when a young, excitable horse in the next-door paddock prompted her own mount to bolt.

She and her horse, which was on loan, were approaching a corner and Kimberley, an experienced rider, lost a stirrup. She knew she was about to fall.

Suddenly, she was flying out of the saddle and hit the fence as she landed.

As she and her companions waited for the air ambulance to arrive, adrenaline kicked in. Lying there, she says she can’t recall feeling any particular pain.

“I was struggling to breathe because it really knocked the air out of me. My mum saw it all. She was just watching and was with an instructor as well, so luckily there were people there to help,” she says.

She was airlifted to Ipswich hospital. There was no room on board for her mother, Alexandra, who had to follow by car,

“Straight away, I could move my legs so that was not really the concern. There was a lot of concern I had also fractured my neck and also head injuries.

“Luckily it was just the mid-spine I broke. I just remember feeling that I could not sit up. If I had sat up and moved it could have been different,” she says.

In the hospital, she can recall telling staff that she wanted to be the one to tell her mother about the extent of her injuries before she heard it from anyone else.

“It was a bit patchy by that time because of the morphine I was having. I said: ‘I want to tell my mum’.”

She was in hospital for eight days and in a body brace for four months, unable even to put her socks on. It was a slow, steady recovery involving physiotherapy and a lot of patience.

Although young – Kimberley is 24 – she had established herself in a high-flying role working as an internal financial auditor for a Worcester-based private healthcare company working with learning disabled people. She travelled all around the country visiting its sites, and often had to stop overnight.

She loved the job, but in the aftermath of the accident, she found it physically gruelling.

“To be very independent and have that all taken away was quite hard. Because I was working away so much the only time I was here (in Polstead) was weekends. I went back for about three or four months, but the pain I was getting from sitting driving was undoing all the treatments I was having.

“Also, I was having to take lots of time off for appointments and physio.

“To me, when I am working, I’m committed to a job so that was quite hard, having to ask the time off.”

In the end, she felt she had no option to hand in her notice, but it was a great wrench.

“It was a really really hard decision but I could not physically do it any more,” she says. “Some days, I would be sat in traffic for hours. One day, I was going to Wimbledon and I was stuck in a car for 10 hours. When you have still got a job to do afterwards it’s not fun. Saying that, I absolutely loved it. I got to travel all around the UK so it was a brilliant job.”

She adds: “I really like the team I was working with and people there. It’s just one of those things really.”

Kimberley, who returned to the family home in Polstead to recover from her injuries, knew she had to find something which would challenge her but was also more locally-based and did not involve long drives.

She took a salary cut of 50% and did some temporary work at Ipswich Hospital while she considered her future. She started to think about running her own business using a talent she had always had for baking. She had grown up knowing her way around a kitchen and she had the example of her own father, Richard, who ran his own arable family farm business, R & A Morton Farms.

“While I was working there I was already thinking I suppose because my dad’s side of the family have always been in business.

“It was always in me. I’ve always wanted to do something for myself. The idea started while I was there and when I left there I went into full planning for this business. I love cooking. On my days off I seem to end up cooking and obviously with my dad growing crops and producing the raw ingredients it all seems to tie in and I felt: ‘Why not choose to do something I love to do?’”

She researched her subject, got on as many free business courses as she could, and set to work. She already had her accounting background to help her on the business side.

“Obviously having the accounting side was a brilliant help because I could cost everything out,” she says.

She set up her own website and blog, started selling her baked treats at farmers’ markets and began to build up a customer base. This year, she took a stall at the annual Tastes of Anglia Feast East event at Chilford Hall in Cambridgeshire.

Her work schedule has been “manic”, she admits, but she is enjoying herself and hoping to expand the business, and hopefully, when it is big enough, move out of the family kitchen.

She’s had a lot of support from the family, including younger brother Tommy, 17, in setting it all up.

She called it Little Treats Bakery and quite quickly established a niche for making macaroons and small baked goods and sweets.

“I just started with the usual cake and breads and quite quickly I started doing macaroons which is the one that’s really taken off because through what I’ve seen I have not seen anyone else doing it locally.

“It seems to be the new in thing. I try to use British where I can, obviously dad being a farmer,” she says. “I have been very lucky. It’s growing gradually and then January I knew it was going to be a quite a quiet month so I spent most of the month on the internet, on the phone, writing letters, trying to build awareness of the business and already it’s paying off.”

She’s now been going for about a year and is hopeful for the future.

“I like to work from myself because it’s more flexible but I work a lot more hours. I don’t tend to have set days off,” she says.

She says she doesn’t want to force the business to grow, but will take it slowly.

“I think that’s where people can go wrong and I’m going to let it grow naturally,” she says.

If she gets to a point where she can take people on in the business, that would be lovely, she says, but she would like it to stay in the general area.

“I like it here and it would be quite nice to have a business base,” she says.

Products like macaroons take around four hours for a single batch, so they are time-consuming. She would like to develop other products using Polstead’s array of cherries and other seasonal fruit.

She sells online, and her many ranges include decorate cupcakes, fudge and truffles. All the hard work is beginning to pay off and she is in talks with retailers about stocking some of her lines. She’s also attending farmers’ markets and getting herself out and about. She bakes to order for members of the public.

While she wants to keep her costs down, she is also looking at the next business step and assessing her retail options.

Three years on from her accident, Kimberley is putting her life back together.

“It’s just biding my time and seeing where it goes. It was horrendous. Every single piece of my life has changed. You appreciate the more important things – it makes you reassess,” she says.

“You appreciate everything, you really do – just being able to walk and do things myself again. It does make you appreciate things.”