IF DECIDING WHERE TO LIVE involved neither cost nor family ties, rounded and gregarious folk would surely form a long queue in the finest Regency town in the Cotswolds. Cheltenham is the festival capital of Britain and, while it caters solicitously for lovers of jazz, literature, cricket and even cheese, it is the annual racing festival for which it is best known.

It was cricket that first drew me to Cheltenham but racing that inspired me to literature and, ultimately, to residence. Long before moving into the town I had written a book about its racecourse. It was hardly an exclusive offering, for The Festival (the traditional prefix “National Hunt” has been surreptitiously shed) has inspired countless volumes.

Researching my book led me into the mothballed history of a place regarded by many devotees with semi-religious awe. I learnt the chequered background of racing in Cheltenham, where, in 1827, a curate named Francis Close preached an angry sermon entitled “The evil consequences of attending the racecourse, exposed”.

By curious coincidence that only some put down as an act of God, the racecourse stand was burnt down the next year. That the militants failed in their mission is self-evident. Next week 235,000 people will risk the “evil consequences” at a festival extended, only last year, to four days.

Cheltenham’s racing has been a source of literature for 150 years.

Adam Lindsay Gordon, a founder pupil at Cheltenham Boys’ College in the 1840s, had an aptitude for verse. His poem How We Beat The Favourite, describing a race over ditches and stone walls at Noverton, a short walk from the Cheltenham course of today, remains a classic of the genre, not least for its poignancy. Lindsay Gordon was banished to Australia by his father, a college lecturer anxious that his son was frittering his life away on the turf. He became a champion amateur rider but shot himself at the age of 37.

These days, racing is far more socially acceptable. Indeed, Cheltenham week is the first to be blocked off, each year, in many a diary. While the racing itself attracts an ever more protracted build-up, the event is also a social mecca, as described by Kate Fox in her anthropological study The Racing Tribe.

“This annual tribal gathering is invariably spoken of in an affectionate, sometimes reverent manner. Criticism of it is tantamount to blasphemy . . . Cheltenham is also used as a key reference point in the tribal calendar. Just as we might speak of something happening ‘before Christmas’ or ‘after Easter’, Racing Tribe Enthusiasts will say ‘We must get together after Cheltenham’.”

The tweed-and-Barbour set is prominent at Cheltenham but subsidiary to the other descending force, known simply as “The Irish”. They comprise a third of the total crowd but make the noise of double that number. For most who fly across the Irish Sea, it is a pilgrimage that shapes their view of a year. The Irish come to carouse and they do it in style, turning this elegant town and its surrounds into a bacchanalian stage-set. The Queen’s Hotel used to take down its paintings and replace the period furniture with garden chairs and tables for festival week.

But they also come in the same guise as national football supporters, their gambling focused almost exclusively on horses trained in their homeland. This phenomenon has formed part of many books on the subject but one that addressed it squarely was John Scally’s Them And Us.

Scally, a native of Roscommon, described it thus: “When they bet on an Irish horse at Cheltenham, Irish fans are betting on national property, investing emotional as well as tangible currency. When an Irish horse loses, the loss is more than just monetary. Any Irish win precipitates a show of national identity . . . the eyes have it, grown men blubbering like babies as they come back from the winners’ enclosure. Cheltenham torments them in their waking hours and haunts them in their dreams.”

There have been many memorable outpourings of Irish emotion on the acres of Prestbury Park, prompted in recent years by such iconic horses as Istabraq and Moscow Flyer. But nothing, to my mind, can quite match the reaction in 1986 to the greatest Gold Cup I have seen, won against all odds by the Irish mare Dawn Run and her talismanic jockey Jonjo O’Neill.

The effect it had on those of us fortunate to be there was summarised by Hugh McIlvanney in his book McIlvanney on Racing.

“We cannot begin to guarantee that our babblings of what we saw will not be sufficiently relentless to clear bars, cause communication cords to be grabbed on trains or tempt fellow passengers on aeroplanes to head for the exit at 35,000ft. People who witness miracles, even small ones of the sporting kind are liable to carry around forever afterwards a deadly parcel of reminiscence.”

Cheltenham has this intoxicating effect, unlike anything else I have experienced in sport, and it lends itself to words and books. Just two years ago it persuaded a Californian named Bill Barich to spend a winter learning about the Irish attitude to Cheltenham and committing it to print.

The result, A Fine Place to Daydream, is just out in paperback and as good a starting point as any for those still bewildered by the grip that this event maintains on so many hearts and minds. Barich ends his book by suggesting that Cheltenham has its place “in the slipstream of eternal questions, where people ask: Has anybody seen my hat? What’s for dinner? Who’ll win the Gold Cup?”

The Racing Tribe, Metro £7.99
Them And Us, Mainstream £7.99
McIlvanney on Racing, Mainstream £9.99
A Fine Place to Daydream, Collins Willow £7.99

The Cheltenham Festival runs from Tuesday to Friday next week

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