How a heritage hunt meeting grew into a 100,000-strong spring party: the punchestown festival story, from 1850 banks to bands, fashion and Gold Cup drama.
People typically study the form and the prices before a big meeting, but with the Punchestown Festival, the odds only tell half the story. The other half is about 176 years of Irish tradition, guts and pride, packed into five days in County Kildare.
This did not start as a show. It started with men hunting on horseback and arguing about who was the most courageous by jumping a ditch. Everything else that the contemporary audiences enjoy was developed from this.
Born in the Hunting Fields
1850 saw the first recorded instance of a structured meeting; this was held by the Kildare Hunt Club on the fields close to Naas. There were no real grand stands, sponsors, or even cameras. Just a few local farmers, some horses that were bred for the chase, and the infamous Punchestown banks: earth walls and ditches that separated the reckless from the sensible. The track still runs that cross-country banks course alongside its modern hurdle and chase circuits, a layout almost no other course in the world keeps.
The La Touche Cup, like all events at ‘The Old Banks’ has tradition in its very DNA. The La Touche family, Huguenot bankers who fled France in the 1680s, established one of Dublin’s premier private banking houses and acquired the Harristown estate, their Georgian house a few miles from the course. The La Touche Cup is a cross country marathon of approximately four miles over the old banks. Ride it today and you are riding the very same tradition the founders experienced. Extremely few sporting events on the planet can say that.
Racing festival. Photo: Bence Szemerey / Pexels
When the Crowds Arrived
A significant change occurred in 1868 when the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, came to watch the event. The Prince’s attendance was a huge event – special trains were put in place for the occasion, businesses closed, and the roads to Kildare were clogged for miles. Punchestown transformed overnight from a county event to a national event with the Prince in attendance. With the exception of a few wartime gaps, it has remained a date on the Irish calendar ever since.
Since then, the numbers only increased. A few hundred hunting families became tens of thousands, then well over 100,000 spread across the modern five-day festival. The numbers kept growing while the heritage remained the same. The difference was only in the scale of the event. A Kildare field had transformed into one of the great social events in the Irish calendar, the type of event you cleared your calendar for.
The Season’s Last Word
Here’s something the casual visitor overlooks. Punchestown is the climax of the Irish National Hunt season, which runs from late April into May, so whatever Cheltenham begins in March gets concluded here. The Punchestown Gold Cup and the hurdles rematches are where the arguments settle and champions of the season get crowned.
Willie Mullins also calls this region home, with his Closutton yard a short distance away in Carlow, where Faugheen, Douvan and Un de Sceaux have all been stars. Winning the leading trainer title at Punchestown has become a formality, with local fans celebrating like it’s a home team trophy win. Punchestown is also home to great human moments. Ruby Walsh, the greatest jump jockey of his generation, picked Punchestown to retire on the spot in May 2019, just minutes after winning the Gold Cup on Kemboy. An ending like that is not scripted. No other place is able to attract moments like that as Punchestown does.
Racing crowd. Photo: Bence Szemerey / Pexels
More Than Horses Now
In addition to racing, there are Best Dressed Lady competitions, hospitality marquees, live bands, food trucks, and a Guinness tent that will be doing a roaring trade. For years, the same ground hosted the Oxegen music festival that took place at Punchestown from 2004 to 2011 (no festival in 2010). It pulled rock fans to the birthplace of jump racing.
None of this took the place of the sport. It encompassed it. The festival now injects tens of millions of euro into Kildare, books out every hotel in Naas and takes on a small army of temporary staff for the week. The heritage became the centrepiece, and the entertainment became the reason an entirely new audience showed up. This is how a hunt meeting becomes mass entertainment while retaining its soul.
What Makes Punchestown Different
A few things set this festival apart from the rest of the calendar:
- With it being the season finale for Irish jump racing, the champions are crowned here, and not back at Christmas.
- The La Touche Cup and banks course continue to preserve an authentic tradition in cross-country running.
- Local hero Willie Mullins, who is just up the road in Carlow, almost every year makes it a home-turf show.
- The Punchestown Gold Cup usually puts to rest disputes that originated during Cheltenham in March.
- It operates during spring, not the harsh winter months, so the entire experience seems more like a celebration as opposed to a survival ordeal.
- It fills all of the hotels in Naas and adds tens of millions of euros to Kildare every spring.
Where the Numbers Meet the Nerve
This is a racing festival, so obviously transactions will take place. Punters spend the winter studying who peaked when, and by the time you check the Punchestown Festival markets, the prices already carry all that history, every Cheltenham near-miss and every horse arriving here to prove a point it could not make in England.
Punchestown understands and appreciates the emotional value of going above and beyond, something the odds can’t quantify and something that the venue gives an extra reward for.
Five Days Ireland Refuses to Grow Out Of
Starting with just a few hunting men in 1850, this festival has not forgotten its origins as it has transformed into a 100,000-strong spring carnival. It has kept building new rooms onto the same old house, year after year, until that house became one of the biggest parties in the whole country.
That is the trick with heritage: handled right, it does not hold a festival back. Instead, it becomes the very reason millions of people, generation after generation, want to come.