Hotels for Badminton Horse Trials 2027

Four days of eventing bring together the sport's biggest names for dressage, cross-country and show jumping across a single long weekend. Trade stands, food stalls and a shopping village fill the gaps between the action, and the cross-country day draws by far the largest crowds. Dress leans practical rather than smart — wellies and waterproofs are standard whatever the forecast says.

Badminton Horse Trials began in 1949, the idea of the 10th Duke of Beaufort, who hosted it on his own parkland at Badminton House in Gloucestershire. Eventing had only just arrived in Britain as an Olympic sport, at the 1948 London Games, and the Duke saw the value of a permanent, demanding three-day event on home soil to train and select British riders for future Games — Badminton was only the second three-day event ever held in the country.

Twenty-two horses contested that first running, won by Golden Willow. Nearly eighty years on, the cross-country day, when riders and horses tackle a punishing course of solid fences across Gloucestershire parkland in front of huge crowds, is still built on the same purpose the Duke intended: producing horses and riders capable of competing at the very top level.