Cheltenham Festival

Gold Cup Day tickets sell out before Champion Hurdle Day tickets in most years, which tells you something about the priorities of the people who come. The Cheltenham Gold Cup on the Friday of the March festival is genuinely the best steeplechase in the world run over the best course, and the crowd of 70,000 people who fill the grandstand for it is an overwhelming proportion Irish. The Guinness Village exists because the Irish contingent demanded appropriate catering. They are correct.

The Festival

Four days each March, typically the second week. Champion Day (Tuesday) opens with the Champion Hurdle. Style Wednesday. St. Patrick’s Thursday with the Ryanair Chase and Stayers’ Hurdle. Gold Cup Day on Friday. Over 400,000 racegoers attend across the four days.

Tickets in the Tattersalls enclosure run around GBP 42 to 100 depending on day and booking timing. The Club Enclosure puts you closest to the finish post. Gold Cup Day typically sells out months in advance; book as soon as tickets release at the start of autumn for the following March meeting.

The Atmosphere

The Irish presence at Cheltenham is not tourism. The biggest trainers and owners in jump racing are Irish; a Cheltenham winner is the measure of a horse. Willie Mullins, Gordon Elliott, and a dozen more have trained horses on Irish tracks all winter specifically for this week. When the horses are paraded before a race, the crowd is reading form sheets and watching closely; this is not a social event with some racing attached.

The Guinness Village operates as an indoor arena between races. The Irish singing and the cross-border racing gossip are both parts of the experience.

Cheltenham Town

The town itself is a Regency spa: wide tree-lined avenues, the Promenade with its good independent restaurants and shops, and the Pittville Pump Room from 1830 if you want to understand what the original visitors came for before racing took over.

The Daffodil on Suffolk Parade serves modern British food in an art deco cinema conversion; book ahead during festival week. For something easier, the pubs around the town centre are well-supplied with Guinness from Tuesday to Sunday.

Where to Stay

Book the moment you have your race tickets. Hotels in Cheltenham fill within hours of tickets going on sale for Gold Cup Day. The Cheltenham Chase Hotel near the racecourse, the Montpellier Chapter in the town centre, and various B&Bs in the Regency streets fill at elevated rates. London is 90 minutes away by train from Cheltenham Spa station; some visitors day-trip from there rather than dealing with the accommodation situation.