Explaining the allure of racing to a sporting sceptic is like trying to convert Pope Francis to Islam.

Stupid as it may sound but it usually starts with a horse. Sitting on a horse, working with a horse, or standing beside the last fence in a steeplechase and watching in awe as a tonne of equine flesh comes hurtling past.

If you want to know why people become addicted to national hunt go to a point-to-point. There are few things you can do legally which involve as much sensory experience and risk-taking at once.

That’s not to say everyone who comes to Cheltenham is primarily interested in horses.

For many it’s the gambling or the social side of the festival which acts as a magnet. Cheltenham is a big business: the festival is worth about £50 million to the local economy. But it is also a tradition, and racing aficionados are at least one-third amateur historian.

It’s the memories of bunking off school to watch Dawn Run or Florida Pearl that brought thousands of Irish pilgrims through the gates this week.

Towering above such track legends is Arkle, jump racing’s first superstar who beat Mill House in the Gold Cup exactly 50 years ago in a dawning TV age.

Questions about horse welfare always hang over the event, and whether or not you think it’s cruel to race horses there is difference in both law and ethics between killing an animal deliberately and it dying in the course of a sport.

Racing people are mainly country people and they detect a certain hypocrisy in the urban critic who has no problem tucking into a Sunday roast. In fact, they’re proud of their values.

When jockey Ruby Walsh was criticised this week for suggesting horses were replaceable, he didn’t retreat from the statement but elaborated: “It’s sad but horses are animals, outside your back door. Humans… are inside your back door. You can’t replace a human being.”

Who can argue with that?