HORSES of a lifetime come in numerous breeds, shapes and career highlights. Gortfree Hero - the Irish Draught stallion with a considerable following on both sides of the Atlantic - is another one of a kind in this category.
The now 24-year-old made a recent swansong appearance at the Westmeath/Offaly IDHBA stallion parade at Mullingar EC, where a presentation was made to his owner Sean Barker.
He bought the strapping liver chesnut as a foal. “I’d seen a nice Castana mare with Anthony Gordon. I’d never heard of Castana in my life until then, but I brought a mare to him that year [2002].”
While there, Sean enquired from his owner - Francis Lafferty - if he knew of any grey or black Castana foals for sale.
“He said, ‘I have one here’. It was dark and he turned on the light. I said, ‘Jesus, Frank, am I colourblind or is the light bad? That lad’s not black or grey!’ Anyway, I bought him for €1,600. I brought him home, a big, dangly buck, but he soon started to fill out.”
By the Lahinch son Naldo, Castana was out of the Diamond Lad - Rathlin Star mare Diamond Lilla, while Gortfree Hero’s dam is the Uibh Fhaili ’81 - Legaun Prince mare Princess Royale.
The new colt foal arrival wasn’t the first horse on the Barker family’s Tourmakeady farm.
“When I was small, Dad [Tommy] had a mare and himself and his brother [Pakie] ploughed for the neighbours; potatoes, corn, everything. When we’d be coming home from school in the evening, we’d cut across the bottom of the fields and catch the mare by the bob [forelock], pull her into the wall, jump up and away like the devil up the hill!”
Although the tractor later replaced that mare, Sean was keen to own another. “I’d always say, ‘I’ll buy a mare’ and Dad would say ‘Don’t be daft’. But I was talking to Watt Hughes one day - he had Ginger Watt and a couple of mares that did a lot of jumping - and he said, ‘If you buy anything, buy a Ginger Dick’.”
“So I’d be watching the Farmers Journal, at the time horses were advertised on it and I’d seen a Ginger Dick foal for sale down in Swinford. I went down, bought the foal and, when I was going collecting, I said to Dad, ‘Come on, we’ll go for a spin’. Halfway there, I told him I had bought a foal. He said, ‘What the hell for!’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, I just want a foal’. So that was me started.”
“But he knew.”
A later buy was a thoroughbred mare from Kedrah House Stud’s Tom Meagher. “He said if you go anywhere to cover her, go to Clover Hill. I’d never heard of Clover Hill either, but myself and a neighbour took off there one day. I’d heard all the stories, ‘Don’t be asking questions, don’t go demanding Clover Hill’. There was Philip sitting on the railway sleeper on the 20-gallon drums. We got on grand.”
Ice broken, the Ginger Dick mare went on to breed four Clover Hill foals. Stud fee-free.
“It was only 30 pounds! I was trying to give the money to Philip one day, he said ‘Like a good man, put that in your pocket or you’re never to come here again’.”
Mayo men always found a way to circumvent Philip’s cash-free rule. Cormac Hanley Snr brought a freshly-caught Moy salmon, Peter McHugh a load of hay and, for Sean, it was building materials for the ‘OK Corral’ as the exercise pen was later dubbed.
“Philip said to me one day, ‘Do you know where I’d get ESB poles?’” Having sourced the poles, Sean’s problem of delivering them was quickly sorted. “As it happened, my brother was drawing timber, so he headed off and dropped the poles in over Philip’s gate at a quarter past three. How Philip knew it was exactly quarter past three, I don’t know. But he knew!”
After several years of the Tourmakeady-Tipperary trek, “the humour came on me to buy a colt foal”. Enter Gortfree Hero.
“I was told by two smart stallion people to castrate him, that he’d never pass. I said ‘No’. There used to be inspections twice a year at that time; he’d go in the springtime, and he’d go at the back end of the year. He went for inspection six or seven times. They called him a carthorse and said he couldn’t jump.”
“How do you describe Frank?” Andrew Gardiner, Frank’s longtime handler, said. “People either loved or hated him. As you can imagine, he was a big, raw three-year-old, but he always had enough form and timber [bone] to carry that body.
“The day he won the loose jumping at the IDHS show in Thurles... that was the first time Sean ever won anything big. He was first with Frank and a horse he owned at that time - Creevagh Grey Rebel - was second.
“People weren’t used to Frank, that type or size of an Irish Draught, when he came on the scene. I don’t have a type of Irish Draught horse. As an inspector, you can’t have a type. But you can see a job for an Irish Draught and Frank was going to do that job of producing the heavyweight hunter, for the big men.
“He was a transformation in Irish Draughts.”
His sire’s closest match: the since Dutch-export Fort Knocks and Brian Murphy win the Dublin supreme hunter championship in 2016 \ Susan Finnerty
Bonfires blazing
The era of such quality heavyweight hunter champions as Fort Knocks and Tulcon Hero was several furlongs ahead when Frank first went up for inspection.
Inspections and blockades can be thorny issues. One year, after several rejections, Sean took matters into his own hands. “I blocked the gate at Tom Slattery’s [Stilo Farm, where the Irish Horse Board inspections then took place], because they wouldn’t tell us how we got on. That time, you’d get inspected, but you’d have to wait for your letter to come three weeks later to tell you the result.
“I told them, ‘I want to know on the day whether he’s passed or not’. And everyone disappeared. So I ran and put the jeep and horsebox across the gate. Lads were blowing their horns and trying to get out, but I said, ‘I’m not moving’. He did get approved eventually after, I think it was, seven times.”
Few owners would have persevered, although Barker’s faith in his horse was repaid.
“He’s won the Dublin stallion class three times in total, which is a phenomenal achievement. He first went to Dublin the year after he got approved. And Andrew’s dad [Ivan] said, ‘He’s two years too soon’. And he was right.”
“Two years later, he won it in 2010. He won again in 2014 and 2018 and he was reserve three times as well.”
Another title was the now-defunct Horse Sport Ireland Irish Draught stallion final at Clonaslee, which Gortfree Hero won in 2014.
The favourite win? “The first Dublin win, definitely. PJ O’Reilly [who had won the Dublin class with Grosvenor Lad] was alive that time and he said, ‘You should be very happy, because I know men going to Dublin all their lives and they never won a rosette in it’. He was right.
“Andrew said he had four rosettes out of Dublin that year. He said, ‘We drove home and we didn’t see anybody! Look at what you had!’”
Bonfires blazed again in Tourmakeady, where over 200 locals turned out for the 2014 homecoming, arranged by local parish priest Fr John Kenny.
More Dublin success followed for the home-bred Frank son, Gortfree Lakeside Lad - another Class 1 stallion.
A three-time Dublin champion with Linda Murphy in the saddle - two Irish Draught performance titles (2017, 2018), followed by the open working hunter crown (2019) - ‘Freddy’ also qualified for the HOYS working hunter final two years ago.
Gortfree Lakeside Lad (‘Freddy’) and Linda Murphy on their Dublin lap of honour after winning an Irish Draught performance class in 2017 \ Susan Finnerty
Impeccable behaviour
How do the pair compare at home? “They’re exactly the same. Frank will nudge you out of the way, nice and gentle, but could knock you over, no matter how strong you are. Freddy will do the exact same thing.
“Frank is a pure gentleman. You could throw the grandchildren up on his back down the field, he’ll walk around you in a circle and come back to you to take them off. He never, ever put a foot wrong. Even when he was in the parade in the Dublin main arena. No matter where he went, he always behaved,” said Sean, who credits Tracy Piggott vouching for Frank’s impeccable behaviour for him to be allowed in the parade.
One infamous device is responsible for Frank’s gleaming coat - that middle-aisle Germany supermarket buy.
“Oh yeah, the power washer! People wouldn’t believe that when I told you about it after Dublin that year. But even to this day, same thing. When we were going to Mullingar last week, Frank was down in the field. He has a rug on this year, so I bring him up to the shed, give him a shot of the power washer, rub him down, into the horsebox and away. That’s all the preparation he ever got.
“Freddy? You couldn’t keep clean,” he remarked about the by now nearly snow-white stallion Gortfree Lakeside Lad.
“I don’t think Freddy will ever quite fill Frank’s shoes. He’s a great horse in his own right, but he’ll never replace Frank. Some say Freddy is a better horse. Like, that Saturday when I was washing them, I thought, ’Na, he’s not the lump of a horse like his daddy is’.”
On the feet issue, it was touch-and-go in 2025 for Gortfree Hero. “This time last year, he spent three weeks down with laminitis. We thought he’d never get up again,” Sean recalled.
Not only did the stallion recover, but he made his final Dublin appearance last August, led by Shaun Murphy (Aubrey Chapman was the handler for Frank’s 2018 win). Andrew was in charge of Gortfree Lakeside Lad, third in his section of the Irish Draught stallion class. Completing a three-generation family appearance in the same Dublin class was Gabriel Slattery’s Fuerty Welcome Lad, a Gortfree Lakeside Lad son.
Red ribbons
Similarly, the same stallions were at Mullingar for Frank’s final party appearance and were joined by Barnacogue Hero (see Breeders’ 10 page 86) and Bannvalley Whisper, both sired by Frank.
Andrew, a farrier, had a multi-tasking day. “He rang on Thursday and said, ‘Will you bring Frank up and I’ll put two front shoes on him’. I said, ‘Andrew, with the price of diesel now, I have no intention! You can do that in the horsebox on Sunday morning’.”
For Andrew’s part, Frank’s first Dublin victory ranks as the favourite. “That was a fantastic year, because I had ribbons in Ring 1, Ring 2, the main arena and Simmonscourt.
“I bred Doonaveragh O One, he won in the main arena, Doonaveeragh Amanda won in Simmonscourt, Jim Tempany’s Dance With A Stranger won the Future Event horse and then Frank.
“I’ve had some serious success with Doonaveeragh O One,” he said about the Power family horse that won a host of classes for both Robbie and Esib at Balmoral, Dublin and Hickstead. “But the breeder is often overlooked. I mean, for the smaller breeders in the west of Ireland, Cork, Kerry or let it be wherever, if they’re not remembered, it’s a waste of time.
“That said, Sean Barker no more wanted to be in that photograph in Mullingar than the man on the moon! Mullingar was a great event and the Irish Draught at the moment is in a good place with Brian Murphy and Joanne Maguire,” he added about the IDHBA chairman and vice-chair.
Champions roll call
It was Murphy who was in the saddle when the heavyweight Fort Knocks, bred by Noel Sheridan, won the Dublin supreme hunter championship for owners Pat Loughlin and Pearl O’Rourke a decade ago. “Same colour, same everything. I don’t think I’ve seen another so like Frank,” Sean remarked.
Another Dublin headline act was the Laura Snow and the late Rob Hare’s home-bred Drynam Hero, winner of the Irish Draught performance class in 2022, to top off Rob’s 100th birthday celebrations that same year.
In 2024, Uisneagh Camus won the HOYS working hunter championship with Libby Cooke aboard. He was bred by Andrew Roche, while Paddy Kilrane is responsible for breeding William McMahon and Grace Maxwell Murphy’s Balmoral supreme champion and Dublin four-year-old heavyweight winner Tulcon Hero.
The Ashling Moffitt-bred A Hero’s Welcome has been another model of consistency for Jill Brown, stacking up sashes at AIRC, Draught branch show and Northern Ireland Festival level and has already qualified for Balmoral next month.
And, matching his sire’s All-Ireland title, Margaret and Des Jeffares home-bred Ballykelly Flashdance won the All-Ireland two-year-old final hosted at Tinahely in 2016.
Frank’s fame has also spread transatlantic. His Class 1 son Bell Tower Banrion’s Hero, bred in the UK at Bell Tower Stud, went to Colorado. He is out of the imported Grosvenor Lad mare Beechmore Banrion Milis, bred in Co Mayo by Jim Cooke and Lynn Fitzpatrick.
Present and presence
Present at Mullingar for Frank’s appearance was Canadian Christine Sweet, who is an AI agent for Gortfree Hero in Canada and North America.
“I believe the first time I saw Frank was at the 2014 Dublin Show, my first time at the show. Frank has a presence that can’t be denied. Even at Mullingar with 20 years on some of those stallions, his presence is outstanding.
“I do remember watching him enter the Dublin ring, with that movement, topline, and an energy that is hard to describe, other than he is a true stallion of stallions.”
“I also remember hoping he’d arrive in North America at some point, because he is just is one of a kind. Fast forward to meeting Sean and posing the question, ‘Would he ever consider…’ and so now, I’m really looking forward to seeing that quality brought to some pure-bred and part-bred mares here soon!”
Gortfree Hero is undoubtedly his connections ‘horse of a lifetime’ nomination.
“I don’t know how you put into words about Frank. I mean, he’s just stunning and a horse of a lifetime for me, isn’t he? Like, in the Draught world, you either said Gortfree Hero/Andrew Gardiner or Andrew Gardiner/Gortfree Hero. That’s just basically it,” Andrew added.
“He will never be replaced. Never,” is Sean’s adamant last word.
By the numbers
2007 – the year Gortfree Hero was approved.
342 – number of Frank progeny on CapallOir.
249 – SJI points.
175.5cm – Frank’s official height.
23cm – bone.
Three – Dublin stallion class wins.
Two – Barker’s sire-and-son Dublin champions and both Gold Merit stallions: Gortfree Hero and Gortfree Lakeside Lad.
One – All-Ireland Irish Draught stallion title.
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