The weather failed to oblige in Westport but Swinford owner-breeder Thomas Conlon was smiling when his Lisbrogan Gold won the young horse championship. The chesnut filly by the Selle Francais stallion Leprince des Bois, cleaned up at Balmoral last month winning the filly, exhibitorbred and reserve supreme young horse titles there.

Bannow and Rathangan and Dublin are the main targets this year for this three-year-old, whose dam is by Bernard le Courtois’s thor-oughbred Hand In Glove, and next year’s plan is ridden classes with Philippa Scott.

It was a Mayo one-two as reserve champion went to Tiernan Gill’s yearling Flogas Pablo. This is the second reserve title so far this season for the Quintero la Silla yearling, after his Newmar-ket-on-Fergus result. Spotted by Gill at the Cavan Elite Foal Sale last autumn, he was sold by breeder Melissa McGirr. She show jumped his dam, Carriagh Carragh (Porsch).

There was more Porsch breeding in Patricia Hoey and Padraig Fitzpatrick’s champion from small broodmare classes with Paul Cleary’s grey by the Belgian sire winning out ahead of Petra Hewer’s Crannagh Hero mare Coolgreen Sally.

PONY CLASSES

Jimmy Canavan chose Sarah Harper’s Lakeside Rosie as his pony champion. The youngsters in the young handlers and lead-rein classes faced the worse of Sun-day’s squally showers.

A purebred Connemara, by Coral Ross, who had a diet of Guinness and cabbage leaves to nurse her as a sick foal, was champion and reserve was Aoife Gorham, who featured in the Irish Farmers Journal’s Westport report four years ago beside her father Damien’s champion Doonhill Misty Dawn (Currachmore Cashel).

Taking the junior Connemara championship was Jack Keaney’s Murvey Jordan (Glencarrig Knight) ahead of Val Noone’s filly Crusheen Dara’s Fancy (Gurteen Dara).

In the senior championship, also judged by Cathy Snow-Coyne and Liam Cotter, there was a reversal of Athenry fortunes with Joe Burke’s Banks Timber (Telgstrup Duke) claiming victory, ahead of Patrick Curran’s Glencarrig Princess Kate, by the Moycullen family’s own Glencarrig Knight.

The final Westport championship was in the Irish Draught section. Here the winner was Maura Walsh’s two-year-old filly Lady Molly Ophelia, by Mountain Diamond out of a Holycross dam.

Sadly, her father Myles, a well-known Draught exhibitor in the west, passed away last month but it was good to see Maura carrying on the tradition. Eddie Murphy’s yearling filly Inishfree Grey Maiden, by his own Inishfree The Holy Grail, was Padraig Fitzpatrick and Patricia Hoey’s reserve champion.