AS all true National Hunt racing aficionados know, the first known jumps race took place from the church steeple in Buttevant to the church steeple in Doneraile between Messrs Cornelius O’Callaghan and Edmund Blake all the way back in 1752. Hence, the name steeplechasing, that is given to the sport that we all hold so dear.

It was fitting, therefore, that some of the top names in point-to-pointing from Co Cork, such as Robert Tyner and Eugene O’Sullivan, plus some of the leading National Hunt figures from Co Limerick in Enda Bolger, Charles Byrnes and Michael Hourigan gathered in Doneraile recently to launch a fundraising drive for the erection of a sculpture of two full-size horses with jockeys jumping a fence on a plinth as a nod to the area’s history.

The monument will be constructed on lands in Horseclose, Doneraile, owned by the O’Keeffe family whose late patriarch Connie O’Keeffe was one of the dominant trainers in the point-to-point sphere all the way through from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Also on the fundraising committee are Paddy and Mary Cronin, Tony Cronin, Willie Hallahan, Michael Moakley, John McCarthy and the 1962 Cork senior football captain John O’Flynn.