Grace Skelton

The fruits of three years of hard work at Alne Park Stud are clearly materialising. Jennifer Donald meets the force responsible for these fortunes

WHY is a trained lawyer, with an allergy to horses, consumed by foal alarms and restless broodmares at 2am you might wonder? But Grace Skelton has always broken the mould and she is writing an exciting new chapter in British breeding since establishing Alne Park Stud three years ago.

Leading us on a tour of the homely foaling barns, a handful of days-old thoroughbreds are taking their tentative first steps under the watchful eye of protective mares. Grace’s passion, eye for detail, and a delightful self-confessed nerdiness for all things breeding shine through. She’s been awake at 2 am for five nights in a row but you’d never tell.

Having started out in 2021 standing one stallion, Dink, she’s since enlisted Ocovango, Midnights Legacy and, new for this season, Subjectivist, to her starstudded roster. They’re expecting 50 foals before May and the facilities offer a nurturing environment for the next crop of potential superstars to begin their lives.

At the kitchen table in the home she shares with husband Dan Skelton – whose Lodge Hill training yard encompasses swathes of the surrounding Warwickshire countryside – and their daughter Florence, Grace explains how she swapped her solicitor’s suit and high heels for thoroughbreds and motherhood when the young couple moved here 11 years ago.

“I rode when I was a kid, despite my allergy to horses, and my father and grandfather had racehorses,” she recalls. “Actually, the colours that the Alne Park Stud horses run in are my grandfather’s, then they were my father’s, now ours. In one of those twists of fate, the first horse we raced in them was called Colours Of My Life. It brings me enormous pleasure to see those silks on the racecourse.”