THE younger-age maidens at Monksgrange were something of an outlier from the evidence of recent weeks in that both four-year-old maidens on the card alongside the five-year-old geldings’ maiden were won by Irish-bred horses.

Of the five fixtures staged last weekend, the Monksgrange results were the only ones to boost such a clean sweep of victories for domestically-bred youngsters, as the growing influence of French-bred horses in particular within the point-to-point sphere has become all the more noticeable.