Best beef parades along concrete catwalk

RAIN stopped the first big livestock competition of the Show from going ahead as normal but gave way to watery sunshine for long enough for it to come to a conclusion.

The Supreme Beef Championship chooses the best of all the individual beef breed winners from the first day of the show.

Last night, for the first time anyone could remember, it was held on the concrete strip between the cattle sheds, because the show paddocks were too wet to use.

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Commentator Mike Keeble said it created a scene reminiscent of an old-fashioned livestock market, with judges and spectators crowding around the animals.

The judges come from the individual breed societies and are asked to score every winning exhibit except their own.

Commercial beef cross breeds are not eligible for this prize – a peculiar feature of the Great Yorkshire Show.

The best of the 15 entries in yesterday’s final was judged to be Brampton Daylight, a Charolais cow, with her third calf at foot, from the Brampton herd of GW Turner at Lingham, Skelton on Ure, near Ripon – shown by herd founder George William Turner’s daughter, Sarah, who now runs it, assisted by stockman Anthony Howe.

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Miss Turner said: “Keeping a white animal clean for showing has been very hard this year but it’s been worth it.”

Her family has been picking up titles for Charolais since the 1970s and is still siring animals from a home-bred champion bull which was sold at Perth in 1998 for 28,000 guineas.

Yesterday’s winner, another home-bred animal, currently carrying her fourth calf, was breed champion at the Great Yorkshire Show last year.

She would have had her first outing this year at the North Yorkshire County Show but that was cancelled altogether because of rain.

Runner-up yesterday was a Galloway heifer shown by Jim Ross of Dumfries-shire and third a Belted Galloway cow and calf from Anne and Alastair Bell, Dumfries-shire.