Ready & Waiting…
Well, the big week is finally here. Months of preparation, grooming, feeding, transporting, loading, unloading, filling entry forms, judgements, celebrations, and disappointments have boiled down to the next few days at Clifden. By Friday we will be heralding the appointment of a new Supreme Champion. Who will it be? A classy mare? A powerful stallion? We can only wait and see what unfolds. Ring one has seen an extensive facelift and drainage works carried out, making it now one of the best show rings in the country. A huge ‘well-done’ must go to the Show Committee for turning out the pristine greens shown in our picture above (Photo: Carol O’Connor).
The 7 day Forecast for Clifden, from Weatherbug.co.uk
Events kicked off today with an educational seminar in the Connemara National Park in Letterfrack at 3pm. The National Park is home to the State’s herd of Connemara Ponies, which is managed under agreement with the CPBS. Visitors will be able to view this herd, originally presented to the nation by the late President Childers.
Tuesday sees the International element of the Show being honoured, with the International AGM in the Station House Hotel (1pm), followed by the International Reception in the salubrious surroundings of the Abbeyglen Hotel.
We finally get to the nitty gritty on Wednesday, when the annual Loose Jumping competition kicks off in the Showgrounds at 2pm. Over thirty ponies – 3 year-olds, drawn from qualifiers held at shows across the country – will compete for the title. This is followed by what many consider the the highlight of the festival in the the In-Hand and Ridden classes on Thursday. Friday brings the Performance day, with the eagerly anticipated Puissance competition, followed by the sales portion of the festival on Saturday and Sunday.
We will, of course, be following all of the above and will try to bring of much of the experience as we can for those of you that can’t make it. The very best of luck to all of those involved from everyone at Ashbrook Stud!
To whet the appetite, we are very fortunate indeed to be able to present the following to you – a gallery of class winners from the 2009 festival, courtesy of the excellent Susanne and Juergen of Foto-Job.com.
The grounds look fantastic.
They look even better when you’re there – really top notch. They were still creosoting and making the final touches on Friday in the sunshine, and it just looked perfect.
Hi,
Why are the working hunter pony and puissance winners not shown?
Regards
Deborah
It’s a fair cop Deborah – we actually do have more of Foto-Job’s photos from the Puissance and Working Hunter, we just don’t have the results. We were relying on the CPBS’s released results (here), but they were not included.
We are working to verify the results of those classes by other means however – and it’s important obviously that we give the correct ones – and we are HOPING to have more to show you by tonight. We hope you can enjoy the current set ’til then!
Just a note for those wishing to peruse the CPBS’s classes linked to above: you can download the numericaly labelled classes no problem (i.e. class 1, class 2, class 3, etc.), but your browser will tell you that the alpha numeric classes (i.e. class a, class b, class c, etc.) cannot be found. What you can do in that case is go to the address bar where you will see an address like this:
cpbs.ie/uploaded/results2009/class_A.doc.Just change the uppercase letter assigned to the class (‘A’ in our example) to lowercase. Change nothing else. Hit return, and voila! You get your results.
Yeah, it took a while to figure that one out…
Niamh in the CPBS office has come to my rescue and will be sending the official results from the all the WH classes and Puissance last year tomorrow (or today if you’re reading this on the 18th!)