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Desert Quest arrives
19th February 2008
We are delighted to welcome a very special new horse to the yard. Desert Quest (pictured below schooling with conditional jockey Luke Kilgarriff) moved into The Beeches last week - he is a top-class animal who has won convincingly on the flat, over hurdles and over fences. This quality 8 year old gelding has won his two chase starts and also counts the Vincent O'Brien handicap hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival as one of his 11 victories. Providing all goes well, he'll run his first race for us this week in a novice chase at Huntingdon on Thursday.
Harry Findlay was at the yard today watching the horses work. He saw about 30 horses on the gallop including one of his favourites, Micky Cole, who is owned by his mother. Micky was galloping with Northern Seren (owned by Evelyn Smith who was down to see her horses last week) and both of these horses are due to run in the next couple of weeks (most likely Thurs March 6th at Wincanton). Harry also watched the two year olds on the gallop, lead by the smart ex-Coolmore horse, El Diego. Visiting with Harry was his good friend Anthony Fortesque Thomas (both are pictured below), who worked with Godolphin for many years and has a fantastic eye for a horse. The horses worked well and looked a beautiful sight as the mist burnt off by mid-morning.
This week we have had extensive fencing work done in our fields, transforming them into smaller paddocks with smart post and rail fencing. This means that horses can go out in pairs or on their own if need be. We are still staunch believers in turning the horses out as often as possible and having lot of small paddocks means that if a horse has not finished it's food, we should have enough turn-out areas to allow it to go out with its food on its own rather than having to keep it in until it eats up. Turnout allows horses to relax, get some sun on their backs and keep mobile rather than standing in a box for hours and hours and we are very lucky to have so much good grazing land at The Beeches.
Today we are going off to look at some possible new horses in Kent and we may also head over to Ireland this weekend to look at some youngsters. It's all systems go at home and all systems go as we search for the very best horses that we can find.
