Home-bred mares steal the show

Remarkable RDS record of Rosemary Connors’s Woodfield Valier continued in the prestigious Breeders’ Championship

Home-bred comes out on top.  Photograph: Eric Luke
Home-bred comes out on top. Photograph: Eric Luke

Two top-class home-bred mares dominated the showing scene yesterday at the RDS where, unusually, a referee judge was summoned to select the winner of the youngstock championship.

With section judges David Keller and David Minton favouring a horse apiece, Libby Cooke was called in to decide between the two and came down in favour of the Hurst Show Team’s Tattygare Good To Go.

Winner earlier in the day of the champion filly title and on Thursday of the three- year-old championship, the Porsch bay is out of the Euphemism mare Golden Delight, whose 2005 gelding, Tattygare Watch This Space, is a winner on the British show hunter scene.

Tattygare Good To Go, a class winner here last year, took the championship ahead of Daphne Tierney’s Bloomfield Eulogy, who lifted the two-year-old crown on Thursday. This Crosstown Dancer gelding was bred by Co Wicklow-based Tierney out of the thoroughbred mare Aerlite Classic.

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The remarkable RDS record of Rosemary Connors's Woodfield Valier continued in the prestigious Breeders' Championship sponsored by the Irish Field. Bred by her owner's late father Nicholas, the 10-year-old Lucky Valier bay was youngstock champion here in 2006 and supreme hunter champion four years later. She also took part in the RDS young event horse classes and, during her career as an eventer, competed at intermediate level.

She was shown with her first foal, Woodfield Extra, a colt by the thoroughbred stallion Financial Reward.

Second in the Breeders’ Championship was Greenhall Indicator and her Mermus R colt foal, one of three combinations in the class owned by Tinahely exhibitor Derry Rothwell. The five- year-old Limerick mare was bred in Co Down by Lorraine Wallace out of a Weavers Web mare.

In the ridden hunter classes, Lesley Webb booked her place in tonight’s heavyweight showdown when winning the four-year-old class on Julie O’Neill’s West Coast Cavalier gelding Lets Coast while the older class went to Eamon Holden on his own Irish Draught gelding Dunleckney Dancer, an eight- year-old by Crosstown Dancer, whose death earlier this year was a major loss to Irish breeding.