HAVING taken to Twitter to praise his good friend Willie Mullins and the team at Closutton for the achievement of winning 30 Grade 1 races in 2022, Culcavy bloodstock agent Harold Kirk has since tweeted about two winners he had purchased for the Co Carlow yard.

The first, Susannah Ricci’s Quais De Paris, justified 1/5 favouritism under Paul Townend in a maiden hurdle at Tramore on New Year’s Day – on his first start in this country - while the second, Fancy Girl, was an 8/11 shot when, in the hands of Patrick Mullins, she landed the bumper at Cork last Saturday on her track debut.

The 2018 Champs Elysees mare was purchased by Mullins and Kirk for £200,000 at Goffs UK’s Aintree Sale early last April having won her point-to-point maiden a month earlier at Ballyragget on her only start for Cormac Doyle.

She now runs in the Hurricane Fly colours of the Creighton family from Belfast.

Newtownabbey’s Anna Ross of Kevin Ross Bloodstock was another publicising the wins since the turn of the year of some of their purchases but the tweet that caught our eye was “Lovely to have past Cheltenham Festival & 7 time winner IMPERIAL AURA back with us to enjoy his retirement. Thank you @Imperial_Racing @kimbaileyracing Hopefully he can teach Holly a thing or two!!”

The couple’s 14-year-old daughter Holly is photographed alongside the 10-year-old Kalanisi gelding with whom she will do some flat work while the bay will also double up as a lead horse when the youngsters in the yard are being schooled over jumps.

Holly’s eventing career will continue on the ponies Star Of Hollymount and Ech Feirin.

Christie wins down Wicklow way

DAVID Christie’s quest to find winning opportunities for his yard’s inmates brought him to Tinahely last Sunday when he struck with the second of his two runners, the once previously-raced Rockandrose, in the concluding 10-runner older geldings’ maiden.

A faller four out on his debut at Quakerstown in early December, the Oscar gelding scored by 16 lengths in the hands of one-time owner Rob James and the combination was welcomed back at the No 1 spot by the bay’s present owners Kieran Mahon, Noel Keenan and Frankie O’Toole.

As he is an eight-year-old, it wasn’t too surprising to learn from Christie that Rockandrose had a couple of physical problems before making his first public start.

“Rob bought him at the Land Rover Sale (of 2018) but then he got a bit of a leg so I bought him. Then, when I had him back in work, he got cast in his box and fractured his pelvis which saw him on the sidelines again.

“You have to think a bit of a horse to keep him for this length of time – and I do. Hopefully, being this patient will pay off and I’m delighted for Kieran, Noel and Frankie.”

The earlier five-runner winners of one race for novice riders at this Shillelagh & District Foxhounds’ fixture went to Doyen gelding Garcon Dargent.

The six-year-old was bred at her family’s Ballystockart Stud near Comber by Sammy Weston out of the well-related Snurge mare, Silver Needle.

To find another point-to-point winner with any local connection we had to travel further afield, to Alnwick in Northumberland in fact, where, on Sunday, Downpatrick-born Tony Dobbin saddled Coole Hall to land the five-year-old and upwards Level 3 conditions race.

The 2012 Flemensfirth gelding, who won three hurdle races and was placed six times over fences when trained by Dobbin’s wife Rose for her parents Duncan and Sarah Davidson, was ridden by his 53-year-old owner, Will Ramsay, who went on to complete his first double since February 1996 in the men’s open.