The Irish National Stud Was Built on Astrology — and It Produced a Derby Winner
On the afternoon of May 26, 1909, a colt named Minoru won the Epsom Derby by a short head from a horse named Louviers. The margin was so narrow that the crowd spent several anxious minutes waiting for the judge’s verdict. When it came in Minoru’s favour, Epsom erupted into what witnesses called “the wildest scenes of enthusiasm ever known in England.” The winning owner was King Edward VII — the first reigning British monarch ever to win the Derby — and congratulatory telegrams flooded in from across the world. One arrived from Argentina addressed simply to “Minoru, England. Congratulations from your father — Cyllene,” sent in the name of the horse’s sire.
But Minoru did not really belong to the King. He had been bred in County Kildare, at a stud farm called Tully, by a wealthy Scotsman named William Hall-Walker. Hall-Walker had leased the colt to Edward VII along with five other yearlings from the same crop. And Hall-Walker, for all his extraordinary success as a breeder, had a method that made trainers and racing professionals think he had lost his mind: he chose which horses to keep and which to sell based on their horoscopes.
Not metaphorically. Literally. He employed an astrologer to draw up birth charts for each foal. He recorded the exact time every horse was born. If the chart was unfavourable — if the planets were poorly aligned — the foal was sold, immediately, regardless of its breeding, regardless of what it might have become on the track. And the stallion boxes he built at Tully had what the stud’s own records describe as “lantern roofs”: gaps in the roofing designed specifically so that the sun, moon, planets, and stars could shine down on the horses through the night.
This is the founding story of the Irish National Stud.
The Brewer’s Son Who Went to India
William Hall-Walker was not a horse person by birth. He came from a different kind of legacy entirely. His father, Sir Andrew Barclay Walker, was a brewer from Ayrshire in Scotland who made a considerable fortune, moved to Liverpool, served as mayor, and in 1873 donated £20,000 to build what became the Walker Art Gallery — still one of the finest free art museums in England. When William came into the world, he came into serious inherited money and serious inherited expectations.
He joined the British Army and spent time posted to India, where he developed a deep interest in Eastern philosophy and, specifically, in astrology. Whether this was the influence of local practitioners, India’s long tradition of Jyotish astrology, or simply the particular shape of his own restless mind is not documented. What is documented is that he returned from India a convinced believer in the power of celestial bodies to shape destiny — human destinies and animal ones alike.
The money to test this theory against thoroughbred horses came from a single race.
In March 1896, at Aintree, a horse named The Soarer won the Grand National at odds of 40/1. The horse was owned by Hall-Walker, who had purchased it only weeks before the race. Four years later, Hall-Walker used the proceeds of that win to buy the Tully estate outside Kildare town — several hundred acres of flat, well-drained Kildare land, in the middle of Ireland’s horse country — and he set about building something unlike anything else in the sport.
The System
What he built was, on the surface, a meticulously run thoroughbred stud. The physical infrastructure was serious: proper stallion boxes, proper paddocks, grooms’ cottages (he named them Soarer Cottages, after the Grand National winner whose prize money had paid for it all). He brought in quality broodmares and bred them to quality stallions. He ran a professional operation in every outward respect.
But the selection process was unlike anything else in European racing.
Every time a foal was born at Tully, Hall-Walker or his employed astrologer would record the precise hour of birth and draw up a horoscope. That chart — not the foal’s bloodline, not its conformation, not the trainer’s assessment — was the primary determinant of its future at the stud. A foal with a favourable chart was kept. A foal with an unfavourable one was sold, no matter what the breeding said it should become.
The stable architecture was built to reinforce this belief. The distinctive lantern roofs on the stallion boxes were not decorative. They were functional: open to the sky so that celestial bodies could, as Hall-Walker put it, “shine their heavenly lights upon the horses beneath, bestowing upon them the benign fortune of the gods.”
The evidence of his methodology survives in the stud’s Horse Museum today. In a horoscope book kept at the farm, there is a chart drawn up for a bay colt named Lord of the Sea. Next to the chart, in Hall-Walker’s own hand, is this assessment: “Saturn in his 5th house…makes him very little good for racing or stud purposes. No good at all except for selling.”
Lord of the Sea was sold.
The Results
Here is the part that resists easy explanation. Horoscopes do not determine which horses win races. The position of Saturn has no bearing on a colt’s stride length or its willingness to run. If you had told any working trainer in 1905 that the most successful stud farm in Britain and Ireland was choosing horses by astrology, they would have sent you away.
And yet: within ten years of opening Tully, Hall-Walker’s horses had won nearly every major race in Europe.
Cherry Lass won the Thousand Guineas in 1905. Witch Elm won it again for him in 1907. Night Hawk took the St Leger in 1913. Prince Palatine, foaled at Tully in 1908, won the 1911 St Leger Stakes by six lengths and went on to dominate British racing in 1912 and 1913. And then there was Minoru, who won the Derby for a king and produced the loudest crowd response in the recorded history of English flat racing.
The rational interpretation is that Hall-Walker was, beneath the astrological framing, an exceptional judge of bloodstock. That selling foals with “bad charts” functioned in practice as rigorous culling that kept his operation from spreading too thin, and that the rituals around birth times and planetary positions focused his attention and structured his decisions in ways that happened to produce excellent outcomes. The less rational interpretation is the one Hall-Walker himself would have offered, without embarrassment, to anyone who asked.
The Horse Named After a Garden-Maker’s Son
Around the same time that Hall-Walker established the stud, he began a second large project at Tully. In 1906 he hired a Japanese master horticulturist named Tassa Eida to design a Japanese garden on the property. Eida came over with his family — his wife and two sons, one of whom was named Minoru — and they spent four years laying out what has since been described as the finest Japanese garden in Europe. Forty local labourers moved hundreds of tons of rock transported from Ballyknockan in County Wicklow. Bonsai trees and ornamental stone lanterns arrived by ship from Japan. The whole design was built around a single symbolic journey: the passage of a human life from birth through youth, marriage, and middle age into death.
Hall-Walker named his favourite colt of that year’s crop after Eida’s son. In Japanese, Minoru carries a meaning close to “beloved” or “the favoured one.” The horse — the one who would eventually carry a king’s colours at Epsom — was born on a farm where a Japanese garden was being laid outside the stable yard, by a man who believed the stars had already written down everything worth knowing.
When Minoru won the 1909 Derby at 7/2, by a short head from Louviers in a finish so close that the result hung in the air for several minutes, Edward VII was in the royal box. Minoru retired from racing in 1910, stood at stud in Ireland for a few years, and was then sold to a breeding operation in Russia in 1913. He was never seen again after the 1917 revolution.
The Gift
In late 1915, with Europe at war and the British cavalry short of horses, Hall-Walker made an unusual decision. He offered to sell the Tully property to the British Government and to give them his entire bloodstock outright — not sell it, give it. No payment for the animals at all.
The Crown paid him £47,625 for the land. What it received free of charge was: six stallions, forty-three brood mares, twenty-nine yearlings and two-year-olds, and three hundred shorthorn cattle. The stud passed to the Ministry of Agriculture in 1916, with a man named Henry Greer appointed as its first director, and became the official National Stud of Great Britain. In recognition of his gesture, Hall-Walker was elevated to the peerage as Baron Wavertree.
The usual explanation is that this was wartime patriotism — a wealthy man making the largest contribution he could make when the country needed it. There may also have been something else: a man who had built his entire system around the idea that the stars determine what will happen next, choosing the moment when fate seemed to require he let go.
From the Crown to Kildare, Permanently
The Tully estate remained under British Government control after the First World War, operated as the National Stud. When Ireland became an independent state, the question of what to do with a British Crown property on Irish soil took time to resolve. In 1943, the Irish Government purchased the Tully property. The British bloodstock was transferred to Sandley Stud at Gillingham in Dorset, forming what became the English National Stud. The Irish National Stud Company Ltd. was formally incorporated on April 11, 1946, and took operational control of Tully on August 31 of that year.
Hall-Walker had died in 1933. He never saw that conclusion.
The stud he founded is working land still. It stands stallions commercially, boards broodmares, runs a six-month breeding management programme, and draws more than 140,000 visitors a year to see the stables, the gardens, and the museum. The Japanese gardens Tassa Eida and his sons laid out between 1906 and 1910 are still tended across every season, still following the symbolic arc from birth to death that Eida mapped out in stone and water and Scots pine. The Horse Museum holds, among other things, the skeleton of Arkle — one of the greatest steeplechasers who ever ran, trained just down the road from Tully — and Hall-Walker’s original horoscope books, with their handwritten planetary assessments of long-dead foals.
When Queen Elizabeth II visited the Irish National Stud in 2011, the occasion included the unveiling of a zodiac-themed sculpture on the grounds: a formal acknowledgment, more than a century on, of the strange and productive system at the institution’s foundation.
The stallion boxes with the lantern roofs are still standing at Tully. Whether or not the stars reach through them, the horses still sleep underneath — in a stud farm founded on a 40/1 Grand National outsider, built by a man who thought Saturn’s position in the fifth house could tell you everything you needed to know about a racehorse, and ultimately inherited by the Irish state as one of the enduring oddities of the country’s equestrian history.
County Kildare has been Ireland’s racing heartland for a very long time, and Tully sits at the centre of it: the buildings Hall-Walker put up in 1900, the gardens his Japanese horticulturist built in 1906, and the horoscope books still in the museum — all of it persisting, long after the man who made it had gone, and long after the horses whose destinies he thought he could read in the stars had run their last races and been forgotten.
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