Caroline McCaldin I'm originally from Templepatrick, Co Antrim and my father Wilson Dennison has been into racing all his life, it is what we grew up with and were raised with. I evented and hunted all my life, and then had an accident in 2015 and was told I wouldn't ride again. I just didn't know what else to do, so I got into the racing. I had a good platform to start from with my father. My husband Alan and I bought an old mill in Dromara, Co Down, it used to be a flax farm. We have 120 acres and we put a gallop in in 2016. The River Lagan runs through us and we use it a lot for the horses legs. We have a walker and we put a pool in about three years ago - I have to say it is one of the best things we ever did. I don't know if that is what changed our luck, but things started to turn around for us after we put that in. My husband was the physio in the Ulster rugby squad for 10 years and now has his own practice at home. He still has his cattle, makes the hay, drives the tractor and harrows the gallop. The 120 acres is well used by Alan. The place would fall apart without him. I've been training point-to-pointers from 2015 and I took my licence out in 2016. Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck at the track, but we are trying our best. People don't notice that over a third of our point-to-point runners have been in the first three (since 2015). I'm quite happy with that as we just tick along in the background. I've 16 horses in and most of them are point-to-pointers, I've a handful for the track. My husband owns them. We are not full up, but the number suits me, the lads in the yard can handle it. We can take up to 35, but I don't really want that number - we had the yard filled one year and we couldn't get a dog to bark. My father also owns horses with me and that's how we got Hermes Allen. I always saw the potential in Hermes Allen. I ran him in a schooling race in the March of his four-year-old year at Moira and he just shimmied his way up through them up that hill in Moira and left the rest of the field for dead. I then said that we would throw him out (into the field) as he was quite small, to give him the summer. We got him back in in July and we took him to a schooling race at Downpatrick. We were asked did we want to go over, so we took him and there wasn't a horse that could get within 40 lengths of him. He jumped like a stag. We just kept the lid on him, kept it quiet and just went about our business. Then Noel McParlan was schooling for us one day and Noel had the choice of riding another horse of my father's and mine, and he chose mine, and the rest as they say is history. He won a Kirkistown point-to-point by five lengths under Noel in November 2021. It was unbelievable when he made 350,000 guineas at the sales the following month. I watched him win the Grade 1 Challow at Newbury on Saturday and I couldn't stop shaking! In my opinion, the sky is the limit - the horse is brilliant. I hope he does it (wins the Ballymore at the Cheltenham Festival). He's tiny, but he galloped all over the top of everything in my yard. That's not saying much, he's the only Grade 1 horse, so to speak, that we've ever had in my yard. The best day I had in racing was the day he won in Stratford (maiden hurdle for Paul Nicholls on 15th October) by 27 lengths and Faith Loving won in Portrush. That was a brilliant day for me, I was vindicated in what I had said about Hermes Allen. I know it was important he won in Stratford, but it was even more important that Faith Lovin won for me. So much hard work goes into them and so much sweat, tears and angst. We have three winners point-to-pointing so far this season and I'm over the moon with that. That is all down to Tom McMahon, Trevor Woodside and Robyn McCluskey, the three that work in my yard. I would love to get a better standard of horses in because I know we can do it. I quite enjoy the hunter chase route to be honest. I love the people that are involved in that, the people in the point-to-points. I love it, but I've been working with horses all my life, it's all we know.
