The New Forest & Hampshire County Show was held at New Park, Brockenhurst over the period 27-29 July 2010. Over 500 photos from the final day of the Show can now be viewed and purchased here.

Most of the photos are from the sheep section, although there are also some of the heavy horse trade turnout display held near the end of the day in the East Ring.

The main reason I wanted to attend the Show was to see and photograph the Portland sheep, which I’ve not come across at many of the other shows I’ve been to this year. This was the Portland Sheep Breeders Group‘s Premier Show for 2010, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed from a photographic point of view. Over a third of my photos from this show are of this breed (the easiest way to view them is via the Portland gallery).

Unfortunately, I was still stuck with my backup camera for this show, my main one still in for repair after coming a cropper at the Royal Welsh. So the pics are maybe not as detailed in some cases as they might’ve been.

Having thought that I’d been getting a little more expert at identifying the various sheep breeds, I realise after this event that I’m still hopeless at it! Probably something to do with having a long gap between taking the photos and editing them, but I really struggled to caption some of the photos correctly, and in fact I’m sure that several are incorrectly captioned. Any help with this, from those ‘in the know’ would be greatly appreciated! I had particular trouble with some of the down/shortwool breeds.

With that in mind, if you’re looking in the breed galleries for a particlar breed, it might be worth looking in some of the other galleries – those of similar-looking breeds – as well!

[Edit: have just found the sheep results printed here… maybe now I can work out what was what!]

Search hint: if you are looking for shots of a particular breed from the Show, head over to the galleries and enter ‘Forest’ and the breed name in the search box. Then click on the ‘photos’ tab. eg. ‘Forest Shetland’ will bring up the Shetland shots from the New Forest Show, ‘Forest Southdown’ will bring up the Southdown shots from that show, etc, etc… (this works most of the time, but not always)