BADMINTON is world-famous for the annual Horse Trials that bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to the region.

But the massive fences and water jumps have not lain unused until next year’s event as hundreds of athletes took to the Badminton Estate to try getting around the course without the aid of a four-legged friend.
And it was double success for a group of athletes from Wotton-under-Edge who tackled the big fences and came out as winners.
The Badminton Horseless Team Event 2015 saw athletes running five miles but having to tackle some of those giant obstacles along the way.
And they were no ordinary barriers, as would be found in a regular track and field 3,000 metres steeplechase event, but those taken by the most famous horsemen and women in the world.
The Wotton athletes, an informal group who get together every so often for races including the Cotswold Relays, excelled at Badminton.
Of the four teams from Wotton who entered, two of them – the men’s and ladies’ A teams – triumphed.
The Men`s A team comprised Alex Alliston, Stuart Jones, Mike Powell, Phil Stimpson, and Rick Beresford and won their race, while the ladies A team, of Rachael Gardner, Beccy Jones, Lisa Cropper, Liz Bolton and Caroline Alliston, also came out on top in their race.
There were also individual successes for Alex Alliston, whose finishing time of 35.46mins meant he was second man home, while Jones clocked 36.23mins to be third man home.
The times of the best four of the five athletes in the teams counted so when Stimpson stopped the clock on 39.23mins as the fourth man home, it secured Wotton’s men’s team victory.
The top three in the women’s team all finished within a matter of seconds of each other, with the fourth runner across the finish line in 48.27mins.
But as Jones said it was not a straight-forward cross-country race. “It is run all around the Badminton estate and you run through three water ‘jumps’ to come out on the other side,” said Jones.
“You don’t just jump the fences but you have to climb them. There are half-a-dozen giant fences.”
One fence saw athletes having to use straw bales to climb high up two levels of the obstacle in order to get over.
But it was all good fun. Jones said: “We are pleased with the results. There were over four hundred runners taking part so to win both the men’s and ladies’ races was great.”