This year’s Royal Manx Agricultural Show will go ahead on Friday and Saturday. Here’s how two people involved with the show have been preparing.

The show secretary

Carol Kennaugh has spent the weekend at Knockaloe as the showfield has been taking shape.

All the main marquees went up on Saturday when the field was also open for all the trade stand holders to come along and plan their layouts.

All the trade stands have to be ready to open to the public by Thursday.

This week, Carol will move her office to a caravan on the show field and will work from there.

The schedules are printed and all the rosettes and trophies are ready to be handed out to the winners.

Carol says: ’Exhibitor entries are down but there are new names and new young exhibitors. The sheep numbers and light horses are up. It’s great to see the light horses so well supported.

’We’ve worked with exhibitors and they’ve worked with us. One of the things we have done is to change the schedule so that all the dairy is now judged on the Saturday.

Carol says that, for her, the highlight of the show will be simply to be able to run the event: ’My highlight is, after two years, we’re having a show. The fact that we have actually gone ahead and we’ve kept it local and we’ve kept it safe.

’We have had so much support and so many messages from people throughout the island: they have been so relieved we are having a show and also so relieved that we are doing everything we can to protect the island.’

Carol also paid tribute to the show’s headline sponsors, Manx Telecom, saying: ’They have completely supported us in all of our decisions, including the decision last year not to have the show. They have been so good to work with.’

The Exhibitor

Jenny Shepherd who keeps a flock of Loaghtans at Ballacosnahan Farm in Patrick, has an enviable record at the Royal Show. But everyone has to start somewhere as a novice and, for Jenny, it was in 2003, as she recalls:

’The first year I entered the Royal Show I had just six sheep. I got a fourth and you have thought I’d won the crown jewels.’

Jenny now has around 800 Loaghtans, the second largest flock in the world and she has won many prizes with them, but she says she always reminds herself of the joy she felt in that moment.

This year she and her partner, Rawdon Hayne, will take 16 sheep to the Royal, including their ram, Tromsoe, who was reserve champion Loaghtan at this year’s Southern Show.

Loaghtans need very little preparation for showing, no bathing or shampooing, as Jenny explains: ’You just need to make sure they’re sound and you can pick the gorse out of their fleece ready for when the judge runs his hand over them, otherwise you’re not really meant to do anything with them.’

Jenny will also be entering fleeces into the show. She breeds her Loaghtans primarily for their wool rather than for meat and she and Rawdon sell Loaghtan wool and related products both online and at their farm shop at Ballacosnahan so the fleeces she produces are of the highest standard.

’I first put a fleece into the Royal Show in 2006 and I have won Best Loaghtan Fleece every year since then, and Best Fleece in Show on a couple of occasions too,’ she says.

Fleeces, she adds, are a lot of work: while they’re shearing Jenny has to sort through hundreds of them just to find the best three for the show.

The best part about going to the Royal, she says, is meeting all the other people who are showing Loaghtans: ’They seem to be a really nice bunch and we’re all there to promote the Manx Loaghtan breed.

’We all want Manx Loaghtans to do well and have a future.’

Loaghtans classes attract one of the highest numbers of entries in all the sheep section but this isn’t always reflected in the Grand Parade line up: ’Wouldn’t it be lovely if a native breed actually got into the last five,’ says Jenny.