Breyerfest Ballynoe Castle RM

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I like to buy Breyers in person at various eventing weekends through the calendar, and how this year, to make up for a season of missed spectating, I ordered up some models from my wishlist, to open and add to my collection on the dates I would've been out enjoying the sport after my bit of horsey shopping.
The final trade stand visit of any year is at the magnificent Burghley Horse Trials, world-class competition with a famous cross country course through gorgeous old parkland, I'm lucky to have been able to go for so many years in a row, and hopefully things will improve enough that I'll be able to go again one day, maybe not next year but at some point in future when it's safe enough to brave the crowds.

Ironically, the Breyer I bought last month but chose to keep back as my 'Burghley day' model, isn't one I'd have been able to buy on the trade stand!

Ballynoe Castle RM is this year's Breyerfest Celebration Model, the one that comes included with every ticket to attend the event in Kentucky. Of course, this year's Breyerfest had to be cancelled, and the special runs were all sold in some sort of complex online system which I couldn't hope to understand let alone sum up in a single sentence here, but people still got their Celebration models by booking the right kind of virtual tickety thing to be involved. 

Not everyone always wants to keep whatever the 'free' model is each year - maybe they don't collect Trads, or don't like the mould chosen, or just want to sell this one on to fund their must-haves instead. This is great for collectors who do like the Celebration model, as quite a lot of them come up for sale on the second-hand market in the days afterwards, and we can often nab a brand new Breyerfest SR for the same price as a regular run.

Here he is again, with different lighting - trying to avoid the deep shade down the front of his chest in the first shot, by turning the set-up into the sun, meant I had to move him away from the background to keep his shadow off it, and that left a gap I had to fill with some fake vegetation. His base is hidden, by not gluing the grass sheet down to anything I can pop his foot peg through the paper and into the slotted base, so the big lump of clear shiny plastic doesn't spoil the shot.

I'm a big fan of this Show Jumping Warmblood mould, and always have been - my first step into Breyer collecting in the first place was the original nameless chestnut release, didn't he start something!

I've now got more of these than any other Trad mould, taking up not one, not two, but three shelves of a bookcase; I think I have about twenty in total, which is rather conclusive proof that I like the mould a lot! 

It's lovely having a handsome new release to add to my herd, I already had a very dark bay (Royal Kaliber), and a shaded bay (a custom portrait of favourite 1990s showjumper It's Otto), but no bright bay, so he'll fit in well with my ridiculously long conga line, and I'm extremely pleased to have got him - a lucky case of right place, right time to see the bargain Ebay BIN before anyone else did!

There's one last pleasant co-incidence about this being my making-up-for-no-Burghley model for 2020.  I thought I'd check out Ballynoe Castle's record on BDWP to see if he ever competed over here, and sure enough, it says he was 11th at Burghley in 2009. I've been attending since 2003 (the year Pippa Funnell won the grand slam), so checked through my photos from that year, and yes, even though it was my older camera with slow reactions meaning less photos per horse, I have three shots of him and his rider Bruce Davidson Jr in action on Showjumping day. 

As with most of the pictures I post on the blog, click the small versions to see them bigger :

  

My apologies to Mr Davidson for accidentally omitting his head from the last one - they were taken on a long zoom from way up in the old free-entry bit of the arena!

This means Ballynoe Castle joins Headley Britannia and Michael Jung's Sam as Breyer portrait horses I've actually seen in real life (I also met the real Milton, but didn't buy his model cos I didn't like the mould, maybe I ought to do a custom mini one - now there's an idea!)