Cheltenham Racecourse

JUMP-RACING hearts skip a beat at the mention of the Cheltenham Festival, although a meeting at the track on any day of the season is special enough.

- W. A. Baring Bingham and Frederick Cathcart

A horse that has competed and won over this lefthanded, undulating, stamina-sapping course with its big fences and daunting uphill finish can be assumed to be a good one. The fourday March festival taking place in Gloucester- shire this week is the showpiece; despite some valid concerns that Cheltenham has allowed its standards to become diluted, it remains the jump-racing championship.

Early racing at Cheltenham was on the Flat. The first meetings were staged on Nottingham Hill in 1815, then, from 1818, on neighbouring Cleeve Hill, the Cotswold escarpment of which now provides one of the most impressive backdrops of any British racecourse. The Cleeve Hill meetings were successful enough for a grandstand to be built on the slope visible from the town and, in 1819, the first Gold Cup was run, as a flat race over three miles. There was racing at Prestbury Park, the current venue, from the 1830s, as well as on Cleeve Hill, but it wasn’t until several years after W. A. Baring Bingham acquired Prestbury Park in 1881 that the shape of Cheltenham Racecourse as we know it began to take shape.