Hotels for Badminton Horse Trials 2027

Badminton Horse Trials — the most demanding four-star cross-country course in the world — draws the best horse-and-rider combinations in eventing to the parkland of Badminton House in Gloucestershire every May, provisionally 5–9 May 2027. The cross-country day, when riders tackle some 30 fences across four miles of Gloucestershire countryside watched by 250,000, is one of the most thrilling spectacles in equestrian sport.

Badminton is remote parkland, but Chippenham, Chipping Sodbury and Bristol all offer accommodation within easy reach. Bath and Bristol, both roughly 20 minutes away by road, are the nearest large cities and packed with good hotels for a Badminton base. Book well in advance — the event fills the whole region.

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.