Barton Snow offers up a Festival winner

It’s not often we can report a Cheltenham Festival winner coming from the ranks of Stratford’s calendar, but Barton Snow achieved that unlikely accolade when winning the Princess Royal Challenge Cup Hunters’ Chase, also known as the Cheltenham Foxhunter last week.

Sparingly campaigned in hunter chases, his one outing on a proper racecourse was when winning at Ludlow in early February, when he saw off 5 other rivals to post a comprehensive 12l victory. But Stratford regulars will have seen him win a novices hunters chase at our Hunters Evening last May in authoritative style.

He’ll be marked down in form books as “a confident ride” by Henry Crow, which hardly describes an extraordinary race in which he was keen throughout, in the van from flagfall, and was only let go at the last to beat perennial bridesmaid It’s On The Line a neck, still not doing a tap as he passed the line. A high head carriage makes him seem as if he’s downing tools.

“The ride of the festival,” remarked the Champ, AP McCoy to ITV viewers, but a typically modest Crow dedicated the win to his grandmother, Sheila Crow, herself winner of the race in 2009 with Kappa Bleu.

Trainer Joseph O’Shea is no stranger to success at the highest level of the amateur division, having won the Aintree Foxhunter with Gracchus de Balme in 2025 too. Whilst something of an acquired taste, there’s no doubting his ability to hone a horse for the right occasion.

The spotlight of Cheltenham success shines everywhere in the sport, and Barton Snow’s Festival success is a shot in the arm for the British Point-to-Point scene, under pressure of falling numbers and the threat to foxhunting.

Just what the doctor ordered as we approach the all-important Easter period.