Creating New Courses

Building a point-to-point course is a big ask but, says Lucy Elder, it’s made all the more achievable with unstinting teamwork — and the best birch

- Lucy Elder

“VISION is the art of seeing what is invisible to others,” writer Jonathan Swift is often attributed as saying. While that’s — hopefully — where the similarities with Gulliver’s Travels begin and end, creating a point-to-point course from scratch is a marathon journey in itself.

The 2019/20 season boasts three new venues, with fixtures dotted across the start, middle and end of the calendar.

So how do you go about turning a vision into reality? Teamwork is the simple answer from Dunsmore’s clerk of the course, Norman Chanin. The new Devon and Cornwall area course held one of the two opening fixtures of the 2019/20 season on 17 November (see report, p68), and it will also be home to the Silverton fixture on 11 April next year.

The hunt for a new venue started after the closure of Black Forest Lodge in 2017. And the Dunsmore course has had the benefit of expert knowledge from Norman, himself a British Horseracing Authority (BHA) course inspector, as well as senior course inspector Richard Linley among others.

“We started making plans about 18 months ago at Dunsmore,” explains Norman. “Black Forest Lodge was quite sandy, whereas Dunsmore is on clay loam land and has been completely reseeded. The grass has taken really well and when we had our open day at the beginning of October, we had a turnout of around 80 people and all positive comments.”

Norman and Richard designed the course, which is just over a mile round and is a fairly flat, oval-shaped track with six portable fences that will run left-handed.

Two weeks ahead of the meeting, the helpers — boosted by volunteers from the Silverton — were putting in the running rails and preparing to place the fences, which have been built locally.