CHELTENHAM got a host of name checks in a remote Swedish nature reserve on Sunday.

Former champions John Francome and Peter Scudamore led the visiting delegation to the Swedish Grand National, an eccentric equestrian event only one rung on the ladder below the Palio in Sienna and racing on a frozen lake in St Moritz.

For a single day each year the citizens of Stromsholm, 75 miles west of Stockholm, are given leave to transform the peaceful lake-side habitat of warblers and buzzards into a sporting arena for Scandinavia's finest horses and riders, cheered on by several thousand enthusiastic supporters.

In a challenge that would outwit Anneka, they only have two weeks in total to create a racecourse and make it disappear without so much as a twig or leaf being disturbed.

Volunteers take full advantage of this being the land of the midnight sun to shift, install and remove two miles of running rails, build a dozen steeplechase fences and erect a complex infrastructure of marquees.

Irrigation was delivered by the Almighty in a storm of Biblical proportions on the night prior to racing, which cleared for 25 degree picnicking summer sun by the time the gates opened.

The 'National' was neatly tucked away as the seventh race to allow time for final touches.

By then, on a card which featured far more lady riders than male, your correspondent had followed a hunch to bet on the first runner ridden by 'fearless' Fanny Olsson to be rewarded with more local currency than he could comfortably carry.

The big moment finally came and the eight runners rushed through the dense forest over a course that could only have been designed by the committee at a particularly late night session; the field's precise whereabouts only discernible by a ripple of applause from onlookers.

The spoils fell to German raider Gluckstag, giving lady trainer Elfie Schnakenberg a rare Champion Hurdle – Grand National double on the day.

So good an idea this project has proved in its 40-year history, for a trophy personally donated by Aintree's Mirabel Topham, that a Royal Park in Stockholm city centre has been earmarked for a Flat racing version next year.

Such an enterprise flies in the face of the more established process of preparing sites for sporting occasions.

A more convivial party centred around horses, which easily outnumber cattle in Sweden, is difficult to imagine.

Visitors are left to manage their own safety, cheerfully advising others of rabbit-hole trip hazards and the probability that where they have just identified as the perfect place to lay their rug will be the landing side of the second-last jump.