NICOLA Perrin’s yard is small; but the achievements that have come out of it are far from that.

A three-time winner of the Connolly’s Redmills Champion of Champions hunter title, most recently with Rathmorrissey Lord of the Dance at Barnadown just two weeks’ ago, she has claimed numerous wins and championship titles at the RDS, Balmoral and Tattersalls to name but a few.

It’s fair to say that she is a rider at the top of her game heading into this year’s Dublin Horse Show. She spoke to The Irish Field this week about her journey with horses and the importance of maintaining the Traditional Irish Horse.

“It was the family business. Before I was born I was bouncing around on the pommel of a saddle,” said Nicola. “I got into the working hunter ponies and showing when I was a tiny tot. I progressed and did that until my early teens and then I went into the Pony Club more and went eventing.

“I was on the junior European eventing team and that led me to go and train in the UK. I went to the UK and I really never came home for 10 years. I went to the Yorkshire Riding Centre and trained with Christopher Bartle. As time went on, I travelled down the country and ended up working for Richard Maxwell for a year.

“From there I went to a dressage yard with David Hunt in Surrey. I was there for a few years before deciding I wanted to move home in 2003.”

Solo work

Home was calling and when she got there she got back showing. “When I got home, I spent some time at Kill International Equestrian Centre where I got back into showing,” said Nicola.

“Then I went and rode some racehorses for a while before getting back into showing properly. I was doing it part-time and then it just got too much, I got too busy and made the leap to go full-time at it.

“I eventually, in 2020, set up my business near Rathangan in a small yard of six stables. I’m here on my own, and that’s the way I like it.

“My fiancé Robert (Jeffers) helps me out a lot, but he has a full-time job. I couldn’t do this without him. He is very much part of the team. He drives the lorry, is out in the evenings moving bales, helping back the youngsters, all of it.

“While in the UK I didn’t do any showing but I evented up to two and three-star level and did dressage after that. I had one horse which we bought at Tattersalls National Hunt sale and sent over to me at the Yorkshire Riding Centre. I had him for about a year, he was only four coming five then and he came back to Ireland. He was called Macloud and went eventing and ended up with Eric Smiley and they went to the 2002 World Equestrian Games.”

Nicola Perrin on her own Solsboro Zeus, middleweight champion and reserve supreme champion at the 2024 Dublin Horse Show \ Siobhan English Photography

Traditional types

Nicola is meticulous in her system. “I like to start the horses myself; then you know what you have. I very rarely would buy them backed or ridden and left off. You don’t know what skeletons are in the closest. Why were they left off? I like to know everything about them.

“I have one broodmare here. I had a good broodmare named Seefin Rosewood who passed away a couple of years ago. She bred some HOYS finalists and all her offspring have been champions here and in the UK. She was a massively successful broodmare for us. We kept her daughter Rosebud, a Dublin winner in 2023, here as a broodmare.

“She was in foal to Radolin when she won Reserve Champion riding horse in Dublin and had a lovely filly foal. She had another filly the following year and she is currently in foal. I will try and breed a TIH (Traditional Irish Horse) horse most definitely and I think we need to see more horses of the traditional type.

“People want them, but people aren’t breeding them. They are breeding ‘big money’ foreign horses. It needs to go back to traditional breeding for your show hunters, your good depth, short limbed proper, proper horses. It has gone a little too foreign for my liking.

“I can understand it to get the movement and the step that is now required in the show ring but TIH horses actually have that step. I’m bringing two TIH horses to Dublin this year and they are perfectly up there with everything else.

“Because it’s gone so expensive with registration and everything, your farmer who had 20 acres and kept a couple of old mares and bred them for the joy of it, that’s all gone. The young farmers are all going and it’s all disappearing.

“You see it even in the show jumping; people are buying a page, they don’t care what the animal looks like. If you go back to the years of Marion Hughes and Flo Jo and Boomerang, how many years did those horses last? Now horses disappear within six or 12 months at the top level, they are not lasting because they can’t keep them sound.

“All that needs to come back again. All this embryo transfer; people don’t know what they are breeding… they are breeding a page. I had two full-sisters out of my mare, they were chalk and cheese. It’s a lottery to breed horses.

“I was walking through Simmonscourt two years ago and I stopped to watch the international rider’s warm-up. I have never seen such an eclectic mix of weird shaped looking horses in all my life. There might have been one or two that looked balanced but not many, and I thought, you are jumping 1.60m, how are you going to stay sound?

Nicola Perrin on Ballarin Rosebud at the 2023 Dublin Horse Show \ Lorraine O'Sullivan

Fills your eye

“I love to look at a horse that fills your eye and is put together properly. It’s balanced. Its front, its shoulder, its back end are all balanced and correct. If a horse is correct like that your soundness level is much better than a horse that’s not in balance. It’s struggling all the time to do the work properly.

“I always have an eye out for talented young horses but I tend to just buy them straight out of the field ‘half wild’ or bred them myself. I like the raw material, almost untouched, but it’s getting harder to find.

“Our hacking is quite limited because the roads here have gotten so busy. I do a lot of work on the ground and take them at their own pace. I like them to come on a little bit each day. It doesn’t matter if it’s a millimetre or a mile just as long as they are progressing forward. I’m generally on their backs within eight weeks.”

Mini-Olympics

The Dublin Horse Show in 10 days’ time will, as always, be busy for Nicola. “I have six going to the Show in Dublin. I am riding five myself and I have one Connemara I’m producing for Cindy Kelly. I have two that belong to Keith Martin and Kate Boyce - the middleweight Rathmorrissey Lord Of The Dance who has just done three shows this year and hasn’t been beaten, so I think he’s one to watch. The other one is Mythical Creature, a lightweight cob.

“The other three are my own. Ballarin Rosalin for the four/five-year-old lightweight mares. Ballarin Babette in the small riding horse, and then the five-year-old lightweight horse Stoneman Team Spirit. I also have youngstock in the fields so they need looking after as well, so it’s busy.

“In preparation for Dublin, this week I won’t do too much with them. They will be out either during the day or all night. You can’t wrap them up in cotton wool. I try to keep them in their routine as much as possible and happy.

“I’m looking forward to Dublin, it’s like our mini Olympics. The minute you down tools from one year you are on the lookout for the horse for next year. We start the work in September for an hour in the ring in August…

“I’m kidding, there are a lot of great shows during the year and nothing gives you the satisfaction of a horse you have produced giving you a great spin, when you’ve taught them everything.

“When they give you their all it doesn’t matter if it’s Dublin or a little county show a mile down the road; that’s the real joy of it all.”