Highlights Of The 2017 Gouden Ring

After a surprise success in 2014, DONALD SKINNER-REID attended the Gouden Ring Show in Belgium in 2015 and hasn’t looked back. Here he shares some of the highlights of the 2017 show, held in the first week of December.

MY MEMBERSHIP of the International Ornithological Association (IOA) and my friendship with IOA president Richard Lumley introduced me to this annual show held in the midst of Flanders Fields. 2017 was the 25th annual Gouden Ring Show. I have spent many holidays in Belgium, a country that most folks pass en route to other supposedly more exciting venues. For cuisine, history, a great road system and excellent local hospitality, however, Flanders can’t be beaten.

The show hall on the outskirts of Roeselare is enormous and sits on the motorway half an hour’s drive from beautiful Bruges. Directly opposite the hall is a sign to Menin Gate, the famous World War I memorial that is built into the town walls of Ypres, which itself lies a 15-minute drive from the show hall. The drive to Ypres from Roeselare takes you through flat countryside dotted with the carefully tended graves of the soldiers of the Great War, including the enormous Tyne Cot cemetery. To this day, every night at 8pm in Ypres, the Last Post is still commemorated. Belgium is world renowned for its beers and the cuisine is the best I have eaten; Roeselare has many excellent restaurants. If you are as lucky as we were and can get a table at Pieter Kookt, you are in for a delight.

Richard Lumley has been instrumental in leading UK exhibitors to this stunning show. Richard and his friend Richard Kendrew, along with Chris Smith and others, work tirelessly for the fancy and at the Gouden Ring – I’ve seen it for myself. Initially, I thought that my Scots fancies were not good enough for international competition. How wrong I was. In 2014, after being persuaded that I was thinking nonsense, my friend Willie McKay took my birds to the show and I won silver and bronze medals for my Scots. I couldn’t believe it. So, in 2015, I decided to make the trip to see this incredible show for myself.