Portcullis gets royal breeders dreaming at Newmarket’s ancient first rite of spring

John Gosden’s three-year-old was among those catching the eye at the Craven meeting, which has been attracting dreamers and optimists since 1771

Captain Cook was a few months away from landfall after his first circumnavigation of the earth when the first ­Craven meeting was held on Newmarket heath in the spring of 1771.

It is older than any of the Classics, and old enough too to have the great Potoooooooo – who got his name when a stable lad was unsure how to spell potatoes – on the Craven Stakes’s roll of honour in 1782. For a quarter of a millennium250 years, the first meeting of the year on the Rowley Mile at Newmarket has been Flat ­racing’s first rite of spring.