Monk's Gold-en moment
The bitter easterly wind is keeping them at bay for the moment and Sandhill Stables is consequently bathed in a watery-weak sunshine as the final morning lot of Philip Hobbs' string make their way out towards the distant uphill gallops.
Despite the sun, the cold is bitter as the lads and lasses, adorned in their blue stable wind-cheaters, and blue helmets uniformly ease their way along a red marl track.
Jack, the stable dog, who is of indeterminate origin, but probably closer to a Jack Russell than anything else, trots along after them. The little brown and white terrier is curiously pink from paw to knee, a freak of nature that cannot be explained.
"He's the boss around here," Hobbs confesses, oblivious to the fact that it has been the combination of his own steely determination and no little ability along with the efforts of the 35 staff and 102 equine inmates, that has made the operation here one of the most powerful in British racing.
Nestled outside the tiny hamlet of Bilbrook, a couple of miles from Minehead, on 450 acres which belong to the Queens Estates, and which practically border the Exmoor National Park, the centrepiece at Sandhill is the Manor House from which Hobbs, over the past 20 years or so, has established himself as a National Hunt powerhouse.
Along with his wife Sarah and daughters Caroline, Katherine and Diana, Hobbs lives in the Manor House and over the years has developed the estate into an establishment of racing excellence from which, in recent years, he has dispatched over 100 winners every season and which has already in this campaign with Aintree still to come earned well in excess of £1m.
"I've lived here all my life," the quietly-spoken West Countryman reveals. "My father Tony farmed this land and trained horses under permit from here as well as breeding a few as well."
Having gained a BSc at Reading before taking up a 160-winner career as a jockey, in August 1985, Philip started training at Sandhill and, since then, along with Paul Nicholls and Martin Pipe, has made Somerset something of an unlikely centre of national hunt excellence, with the trio pretty much dominating the trainers' table for the last few years.
Only Jonjo O'Neill and Nicky Henderson have remotely threatened this West Country dominance.
"We rent about 450 acres from the Queens' Estates," he says, "and back in 1962 when my father moved here, it was very much a working farm with a little bit of horse training on the side.
"Now we are completely focused on horses and realistically we only use about 20 acres specifically for horse training. Critically, it is the right 20 acres in terms of the gradients we utilise."
The consistently developing yard features over 100 stables, tack and drying rooms, a canteen, six staff cottages, an equine swimming pool, two horse walkers, a loose school, starting stalls and other schooling facilities.
No wonder then that Hobbs has, in recent memory, sent out a Champion Hurdle winner, a Champion Chase winner, a Hennessy Gold Cup winner and even a Galway Plate winner (Amiah, in 1998), among very many other major prizes.
He's even begun picking off notable flat prizes, including saddling Unleash for Jamie Spencer to win the valuable Northumberland Plate.
Ever the dapper country gentleman at the races in his tweeds and twills, today Hobbs is dressed down in 'at home' mode, as evidenced by his elderly patched sweater, and he's mulling over his Cheltenham hopes as his festival team are paraded to the press in advance of what will hopefully be a successful raid on the not too distant Cotswolds.
The biggest shock for him this term, he admits, has been the development of star chaser Monkerhostin into just that a star chaser.
"We get loads of e-mail all the time from all sorts of people most of it pure crap," he reveals. "But I got one early this season from one fellow who wanted to know should he back Monkerhostin for the Gold Cup.
THIS was so patently mad that I just had to respond and I wrote back telling him not to be so effing stupid as the horse wouldn't run in the race. I suppose I should write back now and apologise," he says sheepishly.
Since finishing a storming second to Kicking King in the King George at Sandown, and Kicking King's subsequent defection from the Gold Cup because of injury, Monkerhostin has been at the top of most betting markets for Cheltenham's main event, jostling for outright favouritism with Irish contender Beef Or Salmon.
But Hobbs is long enough in this business to deflect the more obvious questions, such as: 'What's it like to have a Gold Cup favourite in your yard?' Without batting an eyelid he responds: "I wouldn't know. I've never had a Gold Cup favourite before."
Having lost his Champion Hurdle hero of 2003, Rooster Booster, to a suspected heart attack on his home gallops already this year, the trainer is only too well aware of the danger of counting any chickens in this game. Its unpredictability is too predictable.
"Having the Gold Cup favourite certainly doesn't stop me sleeping at night. My only concern right now is getting him to Cheltenham in one piece," he says.
Confirming his mastery of the art of understatement, he admits that Monkerhostin "has improved a lot in the last two years," having come from nowhere to Gold Cup favouritism.
"I thought that if I had a Gold Cup horse it would be One Knight.
Monkerhostin was going to take a different route. When I ran him in the Tingle Creek, it was because I felt the two-mile division was weak and the Champion Chase might be there for the taking.
"He was hopelessly outpaced there, so I upped him to three miles for the King George and was amazed at the outcome. That race was a massive improvement on anything he'd done before and he deserves his chance now to go to Cheltenham."
Hobbs admits he's as much in the dark as anyone else as to how the horse will cope with the extra two-and-a-half furlongs at Cheltenham, but he points out that Monkerhostin has in the past won the Rendlesham Hurdle over three miles and concludes therefore that "the signs are encouraging."
Diplomatically, he says he did not see Beef Or Salmon's comprehensive victory in the Hennessy at Leopardstown last time out and did not therefore see the horse banking the final ditch in a mistake which would almost certainly have brought him down at Prestbury Park.
That evidence, such as it was, was enough to convince many that Michael Hourigan's horse will not overcome his Cheltenham hoodoo, but Hobbs will not allow himself to join their number publicly at least.
"Beef Or Salmon is a good horse, without doubt, and if the ground comes up soft he'll take all the beating," is as much as he will concede about his main rival for the Gold Cup.
However, he's urging people not to forget that One Knight would like it soft on Gold Cup day too, adding: "It would not surprise me in the least if he finished in front of Monkerhostin.
"You can forget all the Fs and Us on his form. He's been an unlucky horse, but his jumping away from home is nothing like we see here.
"He schooled brilliantly the other day and I know he's a good jumper. It's just that he seems to think he's bigger than the fences and tries to push them out of his way. I just hope that he's not too keen early on at Cheltenham because that's when he tends not to bother about the fences."
Getting back to Monkerhostin, Hobbs admit he has "no idea" where the horse got his name, or what it means.
He says the horse arrived from France at the same time as another equally-rated beast, who subsequently turned out to "very moderate" and is now utilised as his daughter's point-to-pointer. "they were both supposed to be good horses, so where's the logic in that?"
But those snow-laden clouds are looming ever-closer, though, and it's time to wrap things up and allow the yard get back to its normal routine.
As the press begins to depart, a little brown and white dog welcomes back the last lot. "He really does run the place, you know," Hobbs says.
There have been nine Cheltenham winners come out of Sandhill Stables thus far, but if Philip Hobbs and a little dog with pink legs have their way, this year could see the yard pull off its biggest prize yet.
