Horses in Cluny

Since my blog back in November last year about the Haras Nationaux (National Studs) branch in Cluny closing down, it has been announced that this Haras has been given a reprieve for at least the next ten years. There was a great sigh of relieve in Town and it has somehow rejuvenated the town’s horse connections. After a lull when the imminient closure was announced, works have restarted on at the Equivallée (the show jumping facility) and have been going on all winter with a fascinating array of different layers being added to the all-weather rings and now there are two fully up and running all-weather rings, the grass ring, which has had some of the pressure taken off it, is in excellent condition and there are two practise rings as well..

Since the spring, there seems to have been at least one event every week. We have stumbled across various shows and jumping events in and around the Haras. This does tend to disrupt the traffic through the town as the temporary stables are on one side of the main road and the Equivallée is on the other, but it does brings a lot of life into Cluny.

Last weekend’s event was an auction of thoroughbreds. The auction started at 10.00 according the posters but, as veterans of Cluny events, we decided to arrive about an hour after the published starting time in the hope that things had got going. We were entertained to a number of demonstrations in one of the all-weather rings amongst which there was a cowboy like chap breaking in a young foal. We also saw the officials from the Haras parading round the Haras itself, then into the Equivalée and there were loads of stalls selling all sorts of horsey things including some ghastly 70’s looking horse paintings on velvet. But sadly no auction.

We asked a number of official-looking people what time the auction itself would start and had varying answers from “any minute now” (accompanied by the dangerous word normalement which usually means, I haven’t a clue when) to “in about an hour’s time”. However, we were already approaching 11.30 so if you add an hour to that you are well into lunchtime. As nothing happens during lunch round here (12.00 – 14.00), our educated guess was that the auction would not actually happen until about 14.30. Just in case we were wrong, we hung around until 12.00 then sadly we had to leave as were expecting guests in our gites.

With the amount of activity going on, in and around Cluny this year with Cluny 2010, I am sure we will bump into some more horse events, so at the end of the day we weren’t too disappointed.

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