Family traditions still thriving - but where have all the mares' opens gone?

In a sport that is quick to point out how things are often not as they used to be, it was encouraging to see that three of the six races at Tattersalls last Sunday were won by family combinations, a tradition that remains at the heart of point-to-pointing.

Seventeen-year-old Josh Berry rode just the second winner of his career aboard A Rated in the open lightweight, the vastly experienced former three-time northern champion Noel McParlan took the older geldings’ maiden aboard Getaway Drumlee, and James Kenny won the five-year-old geldings’ maiden on Sam Magee.

All three of those successes came aboard horses trained by the winning riders' respective fathers. This, of course, took place just 24 hours after Noble Yeats, a former point-to-pointer, produced a famous family victory in the Grand National at Aintree.