A weekend in Bucks and Northants

I had a weekend of showjumping this week, and to keep up the trend I was very damp on Saturday, and reaching for the sunblock on Sunday !!.

Saturday found me back at the excellent facilities of Milton Keynes Eventing centre www.mkec.co.uk for their annual Mini One Day event, it's a great chance for a fun day out for the unaffiliated rider with all 3 disciplines available over simple well built fences. The idea of these days is to provide a taste of eventing and an education for both horse and rider.

The day had been rescheduled from earlier in the month due to the weather, and despite some sticky conditions in the trade stand area the event went ahead as planned. With the paking accessed via a compacted road, and everyone facing down the hill access in and out is never an issue at Milton Keynes. As we all know the weather this year always wants to make it's presence felt, but shirt sleeves seemed the order of the day for some hardy riders -
It was raining so hard at this point the camera focused on the rain rather than the rider!!

I must commend the photographer I had working for me on the day - Lucy - she used to work for Chiltern and Thames magazine, but now works freelance. Lucy was pretty damp by the end of the day, while I just popped out in the sunny bits and took a few of my favourite snaps while puppy spotting -


On Sunday I was at Earls Barton at the invitation of Rockingham Forest Riding club www.rfrc.org.uk for a team showjumping for both seniors and juniors. The facilities at Earls Barton are really first rate with a very level field with crushed gravel access to the lorry park and very firm ground, so no chance of getting stuck on matter how bad the conditions. the ground conditions in the rings were also first rate. There was some excellent jumping on show and the team from Cambridge swept all before them winning both the juniors and the seniors competitions. I did again indulge in some puppy spotting with a very adorable Labrador puppy, and some inspiring head shots of ponies while they were competing rather the more static head shots I usually take, i think they work rather well

And here are some shots of the winning Junior team.

And lastly one of my favourite shots from the day -