FORMER Junior international event rider Correna Bowe, who these days is better associated with the thoroughbred and Irish Draught worlds, will be focussed on two horses, both mares, when she heads off to Cheltenham next Monday.

Featured in these pages last March, having led up Angels Dawn to win the Kim Muir Handicap Chase for her boss, Sam Curling, Correna will again look after that Yeats nine-year-old, as she goes for a repeat victory in the three-mile, two-furlong amateur race under Pa King on Thursday.

Meanwhile, another Curling employee, Toni Quail, who continues to compete in international events on her own Wellan Summertime, will be at Prestbury Park looking after Correna’s Echoing Silence. That Doyen bay, who won a four-year-old mares’ maiden on her debut at the Limerick Harriers’ point-to-point at Ballycahane last Sunday, is being sold at the Tattersalls Cheltenham Festival Sale, which takes place after racing on Thursday.

With her father J.J. Bowe, who owns a ‘leg’ in the mare, doing the bidding, Correna gave €28,000 for the then unnamed three-year-old, who is out of a bumper-winning Taipan mare, at Tattersalls Ireland last July. At that time, Taipers was the dam of two point-to-point winners from three runners, but one of those winners, the 2017 Alkaadhem gelding Deafening Silence, has since gone on to score twice in three starts over hurdles for the Dan Skelton yard, most recently landing a Grade 2 novices’ hurdle at Sandown in early December.

We wish Correna all the best next week and at Punchestown on Sunday, March 31st, when she is due to compete at the Kildare Performance Hunter Show on J.J.’s six-year-old Cappa Amadeus gelding Patrickswell Sherry. The combination finished sixth in the four and five-year-old performance Irish Draught class at Dublin last August, having finished second in the same class the previous year.