BADMINTON HORSE TRIALS

Badminton is eventing at its highest level: five days in early May in the park of Badminton House, the Duke of Beaufort’s seat in Gloucestershire. It is one of seven events in the world at five stars, and one of the three that make up the sport’s Grand Slam.

Some hundred and eighty thousand people come. A good many bring their dogs.

The Master

In 1948 the Olympic Games came to London, and Britain, which thought itself the home of the horse, saw its eventing team eliminated. One British rider finished.

The tenth Duke of Beaufort, Master of the Horse for forty-two years and known as Master, offered his park so that British riders could learn.

The first trials were held in 1949. Twenty-two horses started, some six thousand people came, and John Shedden won a hundred and fifty pounds on Golden Willow. The event made a profit of twenty pounds. Seven years later Britain won the Olympic team gold, in Stockholm.

The Queen first came in 1952, and came back many times, to stay at the house and to picnic among the crowd or watch from a hay wagon.

The house had already given its name to something else. The game of badminton is named after it, though nobody is sure how.

The Lake

The cross-country runs through the park over fences that do not fall, and the fence the crowd gathers at is the Lake, a combination of fences into the water and out again. When the last horse has gone through on the Saturday, the crowd’s dogs have it.

Lucinda Prior-Palmer won the first of her six Badmintons in 1973, at nineteen, and won all six on different horses. Mark Todd won at his first attempt in 1980 and again in 2011, at fifty-five. Andrew Nicholson rode it nearly forty times before he won it, in 2017.

It has been lost seven times, most recently to the pandemic in 2020 and 2021.

What to Know

The horses are inspected on the Wednesday. Dressage fills Thursday and Friday, the cross-country is on Saturday, and the show jumping decides it on Sunday.

Saturday sells out.

Country attire, and boots. The park is walked for miles.

Some four hundred trade stands make up the shopping village, not counting the food. Well-behaved dogs are welcome.

The nearest places to stay are Bath and the southern Cotswolds.

The mistake is to go only on the Saturday, when the park is at its fullest. Thursday and Friday show the same horses to a fraction of the crowd.

The Court

Badminton is not the Court’s own. Seats in the grandstand for the dressage and the show jumping, and hospitality on the course on the Saturday, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Bath or the Cotswolds, and the table afterward. The Royal Windsor Horse Show follows the next week, and a member may take both.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.