CARLA Williamson, who has just started Fifth Year at the Ursuline Secondary School in Thurles, can turn to her studies on the back of an excellent 2025 with three top horses.

For these Eventing Ireland national championships at Barnadown, we are concentrating on Jane Hancock and Anne Magee’s Dutch Warmblood mare Karolita O, on whom she won the Eventing Ireland EI110 Junior title with over 10 points in hand.

Williamson, who will be 17 next month, and the 10-year-old chesnut daughter of Firestone, notched up three very competitive wins early in the season, the last being in the 63-runner CCI1*-Intro at Millstreet. They were leading the CCIJ2*-S at Cornbury last month when the competition was abandoned because of the weather.

Sophie Swain, who is a member of the Scarteen Hunt Branch of the Irish Pony Club and who represented Ireland at the European pony championships in Le Mans with Here Comes Trouble, narrowly held on to win the weekend’s EI100 Junior title with her mother Catherine’s Irish Sport Horse mare Fabia HSH.

Swain and the eight-year-old Elvis Ter Putte bay, who was bred in Co Galway by Hadley Sport Horses out of the Iroko mare Utha, were awarded the only sub-30 dressage score in the 16-runner class by Sarah Jane Doyle and Bridgette McCarthy. They then had a fence down show jumping before going clear on the final leg for a total of 32.3.

Finishing on their dressage scores to place second and third were Abigail Kenny and the Connemara pony Hogan The Brave (32.6), a seven-year-old Silver Shadow gelding on whom she finished fifth in the Intermediate side saddle class at Dublin, and Chloe Walsh with the ISH gelding Enniskerry Masterpiece (35.5).