The final fence — everyone’s favourite.
We’re just a couple of hours away from the start of cross-country here at the 2026 Defender Burghley Horse Trials, where designer Derek di Grazia will once again be our shepherd over the inimitable hills and valleys of the Lincolnshire venue. We’ve already caught up with several of this year’s riders to get their take on the challenge to come — now, let’s dive into the course as a whole.
The essentials are:
Length: 6455m
Optimum time: 11:20
Fences: 28
Jumping efforts: 46, if you go all the direct routes
And here’s a guided virtual course walk, thanks to the CrossCountry App:
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This year’s course goes in the same direction as 2025’s, which makes it effectively counterclockwise. Last year’s direction change was the first time the course had been run in this direction since 2017, and what it does in real-world terms is front-loads the heftiest of the terrain into roughly the first three-and-a-half minutes of the course.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the back eight minutes are an easy cruise downhill. It’s just a different kind of ebb and flow: riders will need to support their horses straight out of the start box, establish rideability, and then let their horses travel up the long pull towards the Cottesmore Leap (fence 11) without too much fiddling, which will allow them to conserve energy for the long challenge ahead of them.
Along the way, they’ll meet significant questions such as the Defender Dairy Mound at 9ABCD, with its three fences on a snaking bend over a knoll, and will need to make sure they have enough adjustability despite that long, head-down, uphill trajectory.
This direction also means that the back half of the course is heavy on questions, and between minutes seven and ten, roughly, there’s a huge amount of mental work to do.
Is it, perhaps, a touch less technical than last year’s track, and a smidgeon more flowing? Yes, probably. Does it still feature question after question that could create a significant influence on the competition? Absolutely.
Spot the line: the tough corner question at the Trout Hatchery.
One of the recurring motifs on this year’s course is the curved line approach to a corner. It appears no fewer than five times: at the Defender Dairy Mound at 9ABCD, where the straight route comes down a slope to finish up over a right-handed corner on a steep angle; at the Pedigree Ditches at 14ABC, where there’s a bending right-handed line to a left-handed open corner; at the always-influential Joules at the Maltings at 16ABC, which features a left-handed bend to a wide, open, right-handed corner; at the Trout Hatchery water complex at 19ABCDEF (!! Yes! Really!) where the F element is a left-handed corner in the water on a right-handed bend, small-ish but significant; AND, fill your lungs with air if you can, as the final element of the Holland Cooper Leaf Pit at 24ABCDEF, where there’s a very light bend to the line to a left-handed closed timber corner.
“What the curve does,” says Ireland’s Sam Watson, “is it allows you to make mistakes. It allows you to fall in [on the line]. It allows you to move the shoulder to the outside.”
Some of those bending-line-to-corner questions, he says, “walk lovely – if you built it in your arena, it would walk and ride lovely. But when you’re five minutes around Burghley and getting going, you can forget how blind you can come into them. It’s a very fair question, but Derek is just allowing riders to make mistakes there.”
The great thing about rider errors at corner questions? They tend to be runouts – expensive, yes; frustrating, absolutely; dangerous, rarely.
As always, the time here looks set to be tough: 11.20 might seem like a very long time to be on course, but most riders reckon only one or two horses will catch the clock. But playing in everybody’s favour this year is a superb set of ground conditions – arguably the best we’ve seen in the UK all season long. Despite the country’s yawningly long heatwave summer, which has turned England into some kind of desert utopia, except utopias probably have air conditioning and, like, hay, the Burghley grounds team have managed to conjure up not just cushiony grass cover across the whole track, but also a buoyant, supportive ground beneath it. It will be reasonably top-of-the-ground conditions today, but with a bit of spring and a touch of a cut in the ground from Friday morning’s rainfall, and that will help horses to sustain a higher cruising speed and conserve more energy as they travel.
Looking down off the colossal Leaf Pit drop.
Today’s cross-country challenge begins at 11.30 a.m. (6.30 a.m. EST), and our pathfinders on course today will be Caroline Pamukcu and her first ride, the eleven-year-old HSH Tolan King (14th after dressage on 34.4). Following the withdrawal of New Zealand’s Tayla Mason and Centennial from 20th place, we now have 47 competitors left in the hunt in a day of sport that’ll wrap up, all being well, around 16.00 BST/11.00 a.m. EST.
In true Burghley fashion, expect major shakeups and huge leaderboard climbs: in this compact field, there’s just 16.3 penalties spanning the entire class which is, of course, less than the penalty for a run-out from one of those innumerable corners.r
Our first-phase leader, Switzerland’s Nadja Minder and the nineteen-year-old Toblerone, will head out of the startbox at 12.40 BST/7.40 a.m. EST on a score of 29.5; they’ll already know by that point how much pressure runner-up Gemma Stevens and her five-star winner Chilli Knight, who are on 29.6, will have put on them, as that pair heads out at 12.15 BST/7.15 a.m. EST.
Joules at the Maltings once again features plenty of airy timber and tough lines.
If you’re following along bright and early from the US and need to plan party naps around your favourite riders’ rounds, here are their start times barring any holds or delays:
- Caroline Pamukcu and HSH Tolan King (14th on 34.4) – 11.30 a.m. BST/6.30 a.m. EST
- Cassie Sanger and Redfield Fyre (26th on 38.2) – 12.00 p.m. BST/7.00 a.m. EST
- Jennie Brannigan and FE Lifestyle (17th on 36) – 14.55 BST/9.55 a.m. EST
- Ema Klugman and Chiraz (32nd on 38.5) – 15.00 BST/10.00 a.m. EST
- Tiana Coudray and D’Artagnan (11th on 33.8) – 15.10 BST/10.10 a.m. EST
- Will Coleman and Very Dignified (9th on 33.2) – 15.20 BST/10.20 a.m. EST
- Caroline Pamukcu and HSH Blake (5th on 32) – 15.35 BST/10.35 a.m. EST
We’ll be bringing you wall-to-wall coverage all day long thanks to Cheg’s bumper live updates blog – plus, stick around later for a full report from Gemma Redrup on all the day’s biggest stories. Go Eventing!
Defender Burghley: [Website] [Tickets] [Entries] [Timetable] [Timing & Scoring] [CrossCountry App XC Preview] [EN’s Burghley Field Wiki] [EN’s Ultimate GuideBurghley TV] [EN’s Coverage]
