Barbury

Barbury was a very successful event with all three of my novices winning their sections Friday and with no horse picking up a single jumping fault over the two days.

Top Biats scored a very impressive 19 in the dressage, producing some lovely work to lead his section and added nothing to this score to win by 4 marks.  He felt fantastic in the jumping phases and is going from strength to strength.  He will have another two novice runs before he heads to his first Intermediate at Aston Le Walls in August with his target being the 6yo World Champs at Le Lion D’Angers in October.

Henton For Fun scored 26 in the dressage to lead his section of the Open Novice.  He jumped much better in the show jumping and flew around the cross country, again not adding anything to this score to win.  He will now have an Intermediate run at Hatherleigh and a Novice run at Wilton before heading to the Novice Championships at Gatcombe at the beginning of August.

Brass Monkey continued his impressive run by picking up his fourth win on the trot.  He also led the dressage in his section on a mark of 24 and added nothing to this score to win by a comfortable 5.4 marks.  He has come on a huge amount in the past 6 weeks and has taken to eventing like a duck to water.  He is now for sale, which was always the plan, and his eventing program will reflect this.

In the CIC2* Parklane Hawk and Seacookie both did nice tests to score 45.6 and 41.1 respectively.  The ground in the arenas was quite hard and I didn’t ask too much of them so these marks reflected that, but I was happy with how they both performed.

On Saturday I had the four CIC2* horses doing their jumping phases.  It was a very drawn out and leisurely day with my first show jumping round at 8am and my last cross country round at 6.30pm.  Fernhill Pimms, Freddie Mac and Seacookie all jumped double clears but due to the firm ground I didn’t rush any of them across country and they picked up between 10 and 18 time faults each.  Fernhill Pimms finished 14^th,  Seacookie 15^th and Freddie Mac finishing 25th.

With the sun baking the ground all day on Friday and Saturday I took the decision not to jump Parklane Hawk.  He hasn’t had a run since Badminton and is entered for Hatherleigh next Monday so we will hope the rain has come by then and there is a bit of give in the ground.

The team at Barbury did a fantastic job as always.  With beautiful weather, lots going on and huge crowds it is such a fun event to go to.  Although they aggravated the ground it was still pretty firm in places on the cross country and the show jumping warm up was particularly hard but we mustn’t complain too much as the British Weather is so unpredictable we could all be rained off this time next week!

I am now enjoying a week away in Majorca on a family holiday, courtesy of Freddie Mac’s win at Dauntsey last year.  I am back on Saturday and head to Hatherleigh on Sunday with four Intermediates.