Hotels for Grand National 2027

Forty runners take on the most demanding fences in jump racing, a four-and-a-half-mile test that has humbled favourites for generations. The day builds slowly, with earlier races settling the crowd before the big one, and the tension in the closing minutes before the tape goes up is unlike anything else in the sport.

Fashion and form guides get equal attention among racegoers, many of whom have a bet on a horse they picked for its name alone. Whatever happens over the first circuit, the second lap is where the race is usually won and lost.

The Grand National traces its official history to 1839, when a committee reorganised what had been a rougher local steeplechase into a bigger, better-publicised race at Aintree, near Liverpool. That first officially recognised running gave the course one of its most famous fences its name: Captain Martin Becher fell from his horse Conrad at the brook on the far side of the course and took shelter in the water while the rest of the field jumped past him, and Becher's Brook has carried his name ever since.

Other fences on the course have their own stories — some named simply for their place on the track, others, like Foinavon, for horses that ran there — but it's the size of the field, the length of the race and fences like Becher's that have made it, for well over a century, the ultimate test of horse and rider.