Why bolting the stable door is no longer an option

Night-time visitors ensure Richard Phillips has a quarantine barn with perfect ventilation

Richard Phillips, the Adlestrop trainer, would welcome the opportunity to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted …. but, alas, he now has no stable doors. Of all the villages in all the world the Cotswold hamlet of Adlestrop, immortalised in the Edward Thomas poem of the same name about a steam train that stopped “unwontedly” at Adlestrop station in 1914, is not one you would have down as a hotbed of rural crime.

There again you would never have Midsomer, where something as innocuous as a wheel of cheese or a trombone can often double as a lethal weapon, down for much of a body count either.

Last week, Phillips went to bed on a beautiful summer’s evening and awoke the next morning to discover something else “unwontedly” in Adlestrop; all 14 stable doors had been stolen from his empty quarantine barn, which is across the road from his yard and up a short track.

With farmers in the area making hay, and tractors, trailers and lorries out in the fields at all hours, nobody appeared to notice a vehicle trundle down the track to commit the deed. And, with a full moon, the thieves did not even need torches.

The police arrived, gave him a crime number and told him to proceed in an orderly manner, but he has heard nothing from them since and, in truth, does not really expect to.

He suspects they were stolen to order and are already adorning stables elsewhere. He is pretty confident that it will remain one of the country’s many unsolved crimes.

“We had the barn checked for ventilation once, because you want a quarantine barn to have plenty of air circulating,” recalled Phillips. “And because it had once been a top-of-the-range chicken barn in a previous life, the inspectors said it could not have been better ventilated. Well, it is now!”

Of course, one of the results of having Tom Bellamy, a disciple from the Ger Tumelty school of pranks and practical jokes, riding out for you on a regular basis is that every jockey in Gloucestershire has since rung Phillips asking if he would like to buy some stable doors.

Obviously, in a normal year, a number of racing’s great and good de-stress after Royal Ascot by instructing their driver to take them direct to the glamping section at Worthy Farm, Glastonbury.

With the country’s biggest pop festival on a fallow year, that has not been possible in 2018. But Garstonbury, which alternates annually with East Garston’s village fete, is back and the country’s smallest pop festival is all set to go again in the village near Lambourn a week on Saturday.

This time it features, well sort of, Elvis, Mercury (the “ultimate” Queen tribute band) and Abba’s Angels but the star of the show is DJ Instep, otherwise known as Jamie Insole, 24, pupil assistant trainer to Charlie Hills.

Insole has a good racing pedigree. His grandfather was the Irish jockey turned trainer Vivian Kennedy, his grandmother is the biggest supplier of racing silks in Ireland and his uncle is the National Hunt weighing room’s biggest consumer of hair gel, Will Kennedy.

Through word of mouth he is now Dj-ing every weekend. “It’s probably the worst job-hobby combination in the world,” he said. “A lot of weekends I’m Dj-ing until 2.00 and up at 5.00 to ride out. It’s pretty hectic.”