Tanya Buckingham

Burgham Horse Show and weighing horses

On Friday I had a trip up to Burgham Horse Show to compete in the Burghley Young Event Horse class with Sonyk and Buck. I was in for a shock when we arrived as I was expecting a local show, and was greeted with a huge show ground with bouncy castles, funfair rides and trade stands!

Poor Buck thought he had gone to the circus when we took him off the horsebox. I had a very entertaining ride to the collecting ring through all the crowds and the trade stands, I was riding a snorting dragon at times! However once I managed to get Buck to the collecting ring and warmed up we managed a half decent dressage test. I retired in the showjumping as the bagpipes were a step too much in the maintaining concentration stakes!

Sonyk however was a star in the 5yr old class and was very grown up and coped well with all of the outside distractions. We ended up 2nd and qualified for Burghley! We now have both 5yr olds qualified for the final in September which is very exciting!

On Saturday I thought I would take Buck to have a nice easy low key day out at Northallerton mini ODE. It's a fantastic way to get young horses going as they run the xc over a working hunter track in grass, rather than over real xc fences. He was obviously in shock from the day before as he didn't bat an eyelid at the ponies running up his bum in the collecting rings. He behaved really well in all 3 phases and ended up being 4th over all!

Monday was a Dengie day as Northern Regional Manager, Anne Priestman, came to the yard to try out the new portable weighbridge on my horses! I wasn't sure how they would react to having to stand on the bridge but with a little bit of bribery they stood and allowed Anne to weigh them. It was a very interesting experiment as nearly all of my horses are Irish Sports Horse and range from 16hh to 17.3hh - they were all within 60kg of each other! The heaviest was Sonyk who is a 17.3hh French Thoroughbred and Sparkle was amazingly only 60kg lighter despite being nearly 2hands smaller!

Anne made a note of all the horse's current diets and condition scores, as we are going to repeat the exercise in the winter when the horses live in and are not eventing it will be interesting to see what a difference this will make to their body mass!

Tanya