IF the National Hunt season was ambling away in the background before this week, hands in pockets, nonplussed, kicking a stone or two, in the subtext beneath the Enable and Winx and Aidan O’Brien headlines of the flat, then it broke into a veritable canter at Punchestown this week.

There were performances and there was quality and there were promises for the future. Petit Mouchoir was seriously impressive in winning the two-mile beginners’ chase on Wednesday. Henry de Bromhead’s horse was an odds-on shot, you expected that he would win and that he would win fairly easily, but you could only have hoped that he would win in the style in which he won.