'I've been given such a gift of having a yard like this - I can't be burned by the legacy'

The rolling landscape of the Berkshire Downs is lit by the rising sun. Stretching on for miles in every direction, a panorama of green is interspersed with small hamlets and, on this particular patch, a sandy brown gallop, on which a group of horses thunder uphill under the watchful eye of Eve Johnson Houghton. 

Dogs mill around the top of the seven-furlong track as a sea of bay thoroughbreds flow past her vantage point in neat pairs, but it is the solitary grey filly tucked in the middle of the group who the trainer singles out. 

"There's good old Betty," she says. "She's a legend."