SOME 3,000 miles and three Sunday visits apart, there’s a link between Kevin Babington and Matt Page. That link of course is Clover Hill, sire of Babington’s best horse Carling King and bred on the Galway-Clare border by Page, whose story has largely gone untold.

Much has been written about the stallion’s worldwide progeny but very little about his breeder. Gaps in Clover Hill’s breeding start to be filled in but the clock is ticking. Coverage of the Galway Senior Hurling Championship is starting shortly on Galway Bay FM and the genial host is a hurling fan.

“We used to hurl out there on the lawn as youngsters, 20 or 30 young lads would gather there in the evening. Sure there was nothing else to do!” said the sprightly Matt, who turned 87 in September.

The Pages had depended on horsepower since the family came here from Co Meath “in the mid-1600s. Sure we were reared up with horses. We always kept horses, mostly to work on the farm. I’d always be training them or galloping them around the fields. They’d be broken in and hitched up with an older horse to help teach them their job. We had four mares in the house, the four of them would be working every day right up to 1975, 1976. Then we had a tractor.”

In an aerial photo taken of the farmhouse, yard and surrounding fields, you can actually make out the figure of Matt ploughing one of the fields with a grey mare that day. Ohilly Lass, one of those grey mares kept by the Page family, was bought at Portumna Fair in 1955 from an uncle, to replace “a terrible rogue of a mare! You’d find her in any field in the morning and you’d have to hit off to find her.”

Her replacement “was only about £50 at the time. Otherwise the factory lad was buying her. That was his second day out without selling her, he was out at the fair the month before that too.”

The new working mare’s breeding was unknown but Matt suspects there was possibly Clydesdale blood in her background. “They were big, heavy mares back then, 16.2hh, 16.3hh, I suppose they [Clydesdale] were mixed up with a bit of Draught.”

A PURE WHITE HORSE

Ohilly Lass produced Clover Hill’s dam Ohilly Beauty, although, she was not by the Irish Draught stallion Tara, as the sketchy paperwork back then says, but was instead by Killowen Boy.

“He was in Whitegate with the late Paddy Farrell. The Department [of Agriculture] gave him to Paddy. He said ‘Come over here and see what I have.’ He opened the door and there was a foal, bred in Scariff. He turned out to be a fine horse, a pure Irish Draught, pure white horse.

“Paddy would bring him down to Woodford on fair day and walk him back again. He had him for years and we brought a lot of mares up to him, Whitegate was only five miles away. Killimor, where Middle Temple was with the Larkins, was 14 miles and Morans was beyond that.”

Both of Page’s grey mares had placid temperaments, a predominant feature of Clover Hill stock. However, Ohilly Lass was turned down at each inspection by the renowned judge, Dick Jennings. “The mare wasn’t registered. I tried her three or four times, I even brought her to Tuamgraney one day. Dick Jennings even pulled at the gate one day, that was about the third time I’d tried to get her passed. I had two mares that day and he passed none of them.”

Did he give any reason why? “I didn’t ask him to be honest,” replied this quiet-spoken gentleman.

“She [Ohilly Beauty] used to breed every year. I’d bring her down to Larkin’s horse Middle Temple, then I used to bring her to the Moran’s Golden Beaker.

“You got a nomination towards the stud fee, it was worth £10 which was a lot of money back then. There’d be no foals only for that. We had no trailer but the mare would trot on, before the bike, on a long rein. There was no cars on the road then either.”

Middle Temple also produced the winner of the colt foal class at Scariff Show one year for Matt. “We had a great big Clareman mare, 17 hands, we had some great foals out of her by Middle Temple.”

She won the RDS premium offered at Scariff show “and her foal won his class. That was worth 20 quid between them. The first of November came and we started walking with the mare and foal to Scariff fair, we’d pulled up outside O’Meara’s chemist and the foal was going in and out the door all day long. John O’Meara came out of his shop, laughing at the foal.”

A FIVER MORE

First to enquire about the foal was the late Ned Bourke and his son, Fred. “There was no one around much in the morning so the two of them went off for a meal.”

In the meantime, a local lorry driver, who was drinking in the pub and has overheard the other customers talking about the “good foal outside that won at the show” came out and bought Page’s foal for £70. “That was alright, then the Bourkes came back. ‘Did you sell your foal?’ I said ‘I did’. He had to buy the foal back from the man, he gave him a fiver more and then gave him a fiver to bring him home.”

Later sold on to Colm McDonald in Nenagh, that Middle Temple horse qualified for Simmonscourt, where he was sold to Italy. “I went down to Larkins and he said ‘Did you hear about your foal? He was sold above in Dublin. He said when they go to them places you never hear of them again, they change the name.”

There was no name change for the “huge brown foal’ produced by Ohilly Beauty in 1973. “He [Clover Hill] was foaled on the first of May. My father, Alfie, died on the 25th of March that year and my nephew Gerard McMahon was here visiting my mother.

“I said, “I’m going up to see the mare, she’s due to foal and he came along. It was a good job we were watching her foaling. He was a big foal and we just got her in time. She was lying flat afterwards and couldn’t get up, but we got her up eventually and got the foal standing. And that was him.”

Was there any inkling about Clover Hill as a foal? “I knew he could jump! A lad came here from Ballinakill to cut hay, I could hear the tractor beyond in the field at seven o’clock in the morning so I brought the tea up to him. He said ‘There’s a big lad of a foal here and he’s running around the field since I came.”

Galloping amongst the groves of trees in the 17-acre field was Clover Hill. “There was two strands of barbed wire and a drain and he cleared the whole thing. He was lucky he didn’t try to go back, I’d say he’d have been finished if he tried. I had to go back for the mare and bring her all the way around to the gate,” he said, explaining how the foal was retrieved.

CLOVER HILL

He was sold that autumn to the late Pat McNamara from Broadford. “I don’t know how Pat heard we had the foal. We brought the mare back to Moran’s the following year and she had another horse foal, it was only two horse foals she had, all fillies before that. Before Clover Hill, who was brown, she had all white horses, pure white but this one [the second Golden Beaker colt] was dark grey. The same lad bought him, I asked him the same price and he said ‘He isn’t as good a foal as you had last year!’

Bought for £300, Pat later named that first colt purchase after a landmark on his Clare farm: Clover Hill. He was bought as a two-year-old by the late Philip Heenan, after a Moroccan buying delegation had cleared out his stables.

A photograph taken of Clover Hill and Pat McNamara on the day Philip called to collect his new stallion prospect shows an already powerful type, before the horse continued the journey around Lough Derg.

“It’s funny how Clover Hill ended up on the opposite side of the lake to us, in Co Tipperary. We could almost see him from here,” says Matt, whose farm overlooks Lough Derg. “When you’re up there on the hill you can see the spire of Nenagh Church.”

Approved by Dick Jennings as an Irish Draught, on account of his frame and 24cms bone, Clover Hill remained with Philip until the stallion’s death in October 1997. His official foal crop numbers are 2,093 foals – there are undoubtedly more – despite a very slow start at stud.

Philip would often relate how most of the stallion’s earliest crops ended up in the factory as few buyers were interested in youngstock by an unfashionable “Irish Draught” sire, particularly as some shared his exuberant trait of jumping out of fields.

It wasn’t until 1985 that the show jumping world took notice of Clover Hill, when Viewpoint won two classes and placed third in the World Cup qualifier for young British rider Philip Heffer at Olympia that year.

Bred by Philip Heenan himself, out of a mare by another Ringroe resident, Light Brigade, the cat-like Viewpoint paved the way for the other Clover Hill produce. Amongst them was Da Zara Newport Clover, bred in Murroe by Willie Nicholas.

He clearly remembers Philip’s assessment of the young colt when the young foal accompanied his dam to Ardcroney. “I thought he was plain but Philip just said ‘Look at those legs, they’re like hewn oak – that fellow will last for years!” As usual, Heenan’s prediction came true as the Natale Chidauni-partnered bay was still in the prize money as a 17-year-old.

The home-bred Flo Jo was a dual Queen Elizabeth II Cup winner for Marion Hughes, while that same Hickstead fixture was also the scene of Carling King’s King George V Cup victory in 2003. Carling King’s exploits in particular boosted Clover Hill to his best-ever position [fourth] in the World Breeding Federation for Sport Horse (WBFSH) showjumping sire rankings for 2000/2001.

Kevin Babington’s great chesnut partner recorded a dozen winning Nations Cup appearances and won a team gold medal at the 2001 European Show Jumping championships. The pair’s sterling performance at the following championships at Donaueschingen (2003) secured Ireland’s team place at the Athens Olympics, where they finished an eventual joint-fourth.

Babington and Carling King’s Athens result ranks as the best by a combination of an Irish rider and Irish-bred horse at the Olympics.

THE LIST GOES ON

The list of Clover Hill offspring is lengthy, including the Dublin Grand Prix winner Ballaseyr Twilight, bred by the late Betty Parker and ridden by Cameron Hanley, whose father Cormac would bring salmon, caught in the River Moy, as payment in kind for Clover Hill’s stud fee.

His bloodlines were seen at the Olympics too, again with Carling King at Athens and the second-generation pair of Olympic event horses; Kilrodan Abbott and Tankers Town, bred by Michael Hogan and Mary Blundell respectively, who competed at London and Hong Kong.

How does it feel to have bred the £30 stud fee stallion? “People often ask me that,” says this hidden hero of the Irish sport horse world. “It’s grand, I suppose. I didn’t really pass much remark on it for ages until Coille Mor Hill, owned by Michael McKeigue in Laurencetown was jumping in Dublin.”

Matt also recalls meeting a Department inspector at Dublin Horse Show one year and discussing Clover Hill. He mentioned how Pat McNamara had considered gelding the young Golden Beaker colt with the huge jump as a prospective show jumper instead. “Thank God he didn’t!” replied the inspector. “If it wasn’t for Clover Hill, we’d have had nothing.”

Demand was high for Clover Hill foals. “One breeder told me the minute the foal was on the ground, £3,000. That was back in the 1980s, you’d hardly get that now for a foal in today’s money.”

The family still have half-a-dozen mares with two of his sons, Stan and Alfie, carrying on the horse breeding tradition.

“We have two colt foals going to Cavan this Saturday; one by our own stallion Welcome Grandpa and out of a Fast Silver mare – that’s my own one. The other is Dad’s, by Windgap Blue out of a Welcome Flagmount-Coille Mor Hill mare. They are both Class 1 mares with merits. I’ve a Clover Hill mare, Clover Shower. She’s 22 now, in foal to Loughehoe Guy. I’ve had a few fillies and a two-year-old Hector gelding by her,” said Stan, named after his father’s younger brother.

“The lads are interested in horses, sure that’s why we kept the stallion. He’s by Ard Grandpa, going back to Middle Temple, he has good breeding. Otherwise, they’re nearly gone around here too alright, I don’t know of many Draughts either being bred around here,” replied Matt as we talked about the dwindling number of farmer-breeders around Heenan’s area across Lough Derg in North Tippearary.

“THREE FIELDS UP”

Brexit is uppermost in many farmers and horse owners minds nowadays. “It could come alright yet, bypassing England with cattle and horses is the trouble. They might settle it yet, they’re a long time at it!” he commented.

Matt remembers Ireland joining the European Union in 1973 for a particular reason. “I used to go into the mart meetings and this came up that if we joined the Common Market, we’d be going to France for a farm tour. We paid £36, plane, hotels, the bus, everything and we went to visit the French marts and farms, right up to the Belgian border.”

The following year, he got married in Rome to his late wife, Mary and the couple had eight children. “Five boys and three girls, they’re all in Ireland.”

With that, it’s time to let this gentleman, from the “auld decency” generation, rejoin his family for the remainder of the hurling match. It’s been another special afternoon listening to Matt Page, cut from the same modest ‘let the horse do the talking’ cloth as fellow breeders, Archie Smith-Maxwell and Loftus O’Neill.

Looking round the neat whitewashed farmyard, I ask if Clover Hill was ever behind any of these doors. “See that door down there? He was in there once, the day the mare was brought to Killimor to be covered. That was it.”

There is another landmark on the farm to visit but that is for another day, another year. Before leaving, we agree that the next visit will have to be on May 1st.

“Three fields up, near that hill,” said Matt, pointing up towards the place where Clover Hill, the stallion with a £30 stud fee, was foaled.