WORD to the wise, listen to your mother. “I first saw Merrion in Peter Dodds’s Northumberland yard in 1998,” remembers Michael Hutchinson, joint-master of the Percy. “He was a very green four-year-old, but my mother, Pat, who had had a lifetime of judging show hunters, saw something special in him and insisted on buying him.”
A three-quarter-bred born in Kilkenny in 1994, Merrion’s paternal grandsire was the legendary Irish Draught stallion King Of Diamonds, “from whom he undoubtedly inherited his astonishing jumping ability”. That ability soon showed itself, together with his “amazing, if eccentric character”.
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'Sorry, but I wasn't feeling it'
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