PrintIn London, 1961, authorities announced the discovery of a clandestine Soviet spy ring. In Liverpool, little-known skiffle group the Beatles first gigged in the Cavern Club’s cellar. And in Leeds, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease left sportsmen dismayed that the annual three-day event at Harewood House, home to the Earl of Harewood, would likely be canceled.
But 100 miles to the southwest in Stamford, Lincolnshire, another grand English country home existed. Its patron, David Burghley, sixth Marquess of Exeter, was himself an erstwhile athlete, having leapt to gold medal glory in the 400 meter hurdle at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games. Former MP of Peterborough and President of the International Amateur Athletic Federation, Burghley was by then the 56-year-old head of his family’s four-century-old estate, Burghley House, which—like Harewood—boasted the verdant lanes, serpentine lake and circular arboretums typical of celebrated 18th century English gardener Lancelot “Capability” Brown.
Word traveled to Lord Burghley that the Harewood House three-day was threatened, and shortly thereafter he contacted the British Horse Society with an offer. That year, of all the lionhearted starters on Burghley’s first cross-country course, only two finished without penalty.
Capability’s Legacy
403 years before the first horse on course, William Cecil, Lord High Treasurer and chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, had begun construction on a 16th century symbol of status (and still today): a country home grandiose in both silhouette and size. Burghley House, nearly 30 years in the making, would eventually be home to public figures, MPs, officers and other distinguished members of the Cecil family in 35 major rooms and 80 lesser rooms throughout its four-century history. Members of the Cecil family still live at Burghley today.
But it wasn’t until the 18th century that Burghley’s landscape began to take on a more modern aspect, converted from the geometrical Versailles-like style popular during construction to the more open, park-like environment evident today.
“Capability” Brown, famous for returning the gardens of famous English houses like Badminton, Blenheim, Bowood, Harewood and Longleat to a simpler, more natural state, would leave his mark on Burghley, too, laying out wide avenues and upgrading the 9-acre pond to a 26-acre lake at the invitation of Brownlow Cecil (1725–1793).
Brown had garnered the nickname “Capability” because he often spoke of a landscape’s “capability” for improvement; it’s fitting, then, that his moniker has been given to several of the cross-country fences laid out on the avenues he envisioned. In 1961, Capability’s Cutting, a downhill combination, caused several falls; in 2011, riders will have to successfully negotiate Capability’s South and Capability’s Cutting, fences 17 and 24 respectively, to have any hope of triumph.
Watch a clip of the first Burghley Three-Day in 1961.
A Storied Roster
