UK Racecourses List: Every British and Irish Track by Direction, Layout and Surface

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By The Guv'nor · Last updated October 2026

Here's the full UK racecourses list: 59 courses in Great Britain, plus 26 on the island of Ireland (two of those in Northern Ireland). In Britain, 38 race left-handed, 16 right-handed and five mix straight courses with loops or a figure of eight. In Ireland, 16 go right-handed, nine left-handed and Laytown runs straight along a beach.

Below is every one of them A to Z: direction, layout, what they race and how often the favourite won there last season. Then I test the old "he only goes right-handed" line against three seasons of exchange data. Spoiler: the horses might care, but the market already knows.

UK racecourses list: every British and Irish track A to Z

Course facts come from the racecourses' own sites and Horse Racing Ireland's course pages where they publish them, and from Wikipedia's course and race pages where they don't. The racing column shows what actually ran there from October 2025 to September 2026.

UK racecourses A to Z

Irish racecourses A to Z

Across all 12,991 races the BSP favourite won 35.0%. The full breakdown lives on how often favourites win. At the extremes of the 29 courses with 150+ races, Musselburgh's favourites won just 27.4% (175 races) and Windsor's 27.9% (190), while Catterick's won 39.7% (179) and Chepstow's 39.3% (206). Interesting, but it's one season. I'd want the same pattern next year before it went near a staking decision.

Left-handed vs right-handed: does it matter?

Right-handed racecourses in the UK (16): Ascot, Beverley, Carlisle, Exeter, Hereford, Huntingdon, Kempton, Leicester, Ludlow, Market Rasen, Musselburgh, Perth, Ripon, Sandown, Taunton and Wincanton. Goodwood, Hamilton and Salisbury add right-handed loops to straight courses, longer races at Newmarket turn right into the straight, and Windsor is a figure of eight.

Left-handed racecourses in the UK (38): Aintree, Ayr, Bangor-on-Dee, Bath, Brighton, Cartmel, Catterick, Chelmsford City, Cheltenham, Chepstow, Chester, Doncaster, Epsom, Fakenham, Ffos Las, Fontwell (hurdles; the chase course is a figure of eight), Haydock, Hexham, Kelso, Lingfield, Newbury, Newcastle, Newton Abbot, Nottingham, Plumpton, Pontefract, Redcar, Sedgefield, Southwell, Stratford, Thirsk, Uttoxeter, Warwick, Wetherby, Wolverhampton, Worcester, Yarmouth and York.

Right-handed racecourses in Ireland (16): Ballinrobe, Clonmel, Cork, the Curragh, Down Royal, Downpatrick, Fairyhouse, Galway, Gowran Park, Kilbeggan, Limerick, Punchestown, Roscommon, Sligo, Thurles and Tramore. The left-handed nine are Bellewstown, Dundalk, Killarney, Leopardstown, Listowel, Naas, Navan, Tipperary and Wexford, which switched from right to left in 2015.

The test: do horses keep winning the same way round?

Every racing pundit has a horse that "wants to go right-handed". So I took three seasons of BSP files (October 2023 to September 2026) and tracked every horse's wins by direction. Then, for every run from April 2024 onwards, I compared horses whose previous wins all came going the same way as today with horses whose wins all came the other way round.

To keep it clean I used only races that actually go round a bend one way: every jumps race, plus Flat races over a mile (shorter Flat races are often on straight courses). Goodwood, Hamilton, Newmarket, Salisbury, Windsor, Fontwell and Laytown were left out because they don't run one way. "Expected" is the BSP chance of each runner, scaled so every race adds up to 100%.

So yes, horses that have won going today's way win a bit more often: 13.9% against 12.9%. But look at the expected column. The exchange had already priced nearly all of that in, and the actual-to-expected figures of 1.01 and 0.99 both sit inside their margins of error (roughly 0.98 to 1.03, and 0.96 to 1.03). Backing every "proven this way round" runner to level stakes at BSP returned +1.0% before commission over 30,284 runs, which is nothing once commission comes off.

The one gap worth watching is horses with only left-handed wins switching to a right-handed track: 0.97 over 7,333 runs. If I am honest, that's the biggest of four left/right splits I looked at, and it's still within noise (roughly 0.92 to 1.03), so treat it as a question for next season, not an answer. Crazy right? The thing everyone talks about is real, and that's exactly why you don't get paid for it.

Favourites barely notice the difference either. Over the one season in the course table, the BSP favourite won 35.8% of 7,934 races at left-handed courses and 34.0% of 4,110 at right-handed ones.

Galloping, tight and undulating tracks

Direction gets the headlines, but the shape of a track usually matters more to how a race is run.

Galloping tracks

Big, wide circuits with long straights and easy bends, where a horse can get into a rhythm and the best stayer usually gets there. Newbury (long straights, easy left-handed bends), Doncaster (pear-shaped, about 1m7.5f round), Newmarket's Rowley Mile and July Course, Fairyhouse and Cork are the clearest examples, with the Curragh's wide horseshoe on the Irish Flat side.

Tight and sharp tracks

Small circuits with tight bends and short straights, where pace and position count for more than raw stamina. Chester is the extreme: just over a mile round with a 239-yard (219-metre) straight. Wolverhampton's one-mile Tapeta oval, Newton Abbot, Ripon, Musselburgh, Catterick, Killarney and Tramore's seven-furlong circuit all sit in this group.

Undulating and stiff tracks

Hills change everything. Ascot climbs 73 feet from Swinley Bottom to the winning post, Pontefract's last three furlongs are uphill, Hexham finishes with a steep climb, and Kelso has a two-furlong uphill run-in. In Ireland, Clonmel, Thurles, Downpatrick and Galway all finish uphill. Epsom is the odd one out: a U-shaped track with a mostly downhill straight and a sharp rise in the last hundred yards.

All-weather tracks and surfaces

Seven tracks race on a synthetic surface, and they're far from identical. In Britain, Kempton, Lingfield and Chelmsford City use Polytrack, while Newcastle, Southwell and Wolverhampton use Tapeta. Southwell switched from Fibresand to Tapeta in 2021 and Wolverhampton has been Tapeta since 2014. Kempton is a floodlit right-handed oval, the other five are left-handed. Ireland's only one is Dundalk, a floodlit ten-furlong Polytrack oval.

Two dated notes. Chelmsford City didn't race between April and September 2026. In October 2026 Arena Racing Company took over the lease and pencilled in Monday 2 November 2026 for the first meeting back, subject to the BHA relicensing the track. Tipperary is closed for an all-weather development, with its next meetings listed from Saturday 23 October 2027.

The surface split, draw and pace at each of these tracks get their own page: my all-weather racing guide on Tapeta vs Polytrack.

Course guides and draw-bias pages

These guides go deeper on the courses where it pays most.

Jumps course guides

Cheltenham has two main courses side by side, the Old Course and the New Course, plus a cross-country course inside them. The New Course has the tricky downhill fence and a longer run-in for chases. My Cheltenham course guide covers which races use which course and why it matters for form.

Aintree is really three courses: the Grand National course (a left-handed triangle of about 2m2f with 16 fences), the Mildmay course and the hurdles course. The Aintree course guide explains how form moves between them.

Draw bias

On the Flat, where a horse starts can matter as much as which way it turns. The draw bias guide covers every UK and Irish Flat course by distance, and three tracks get their own deep dive.

• Chester draw bias: the tight circuit and that tiny straight.
• York draw bias: the straight six and the seven-furlong chute with its elbow.
• Ascot draw bias: the straight course against the round course, Royal Ascot handicaps included.
• Curragh draw bias: the straight course and the right-handed horseshoe, from the Irish racing tips side of the site.

Members also get my Draw Biases In Flat Racing special.

How I use course form

Look, I'm essentially a statistics/maths geek, so a table like the one above is where I start, not where I finish. A "C" on the racecard tells you a horse has won at the track. It doesn't tell you whether the price already knows that, and as the direction test shows, it usually does.

What I'm after is the price being wrong, not the horse being nice. Course and direction form go in alongside everything else, and if it's already in the price I'm not paying for it twice. That's also why I like outsiders and each-way value over short-priced "course specialists": even when they place we make more profit than an odds-on shot winning.

Same rules as always. Points staking, no going all in because a horse "loves it round here", and if I'm unsure about one I skip it. Some days that means there's nothing worth a bet. That's fine. Understanding that losers are a thing is the key to being a winner longer term. If you want to see how the course stuff feeds into the bets I actually put up, that's what my tips service is for.

Racecourse FAQs

How many racecourses are there in the UK?

Great Britain has 59 racecourses that staged racing in the 2025/26 season, from Aintree to York. Add Down Royal and Downpatrick in Northern Ireland, which race under Horse Racing Ireland, and the UK total is 61.

Which racecourses are right-handed in the UK?

Sixteen: Ascot, Beverley, Carlisle, Exeter, Hereford, Huntingdon, Kempton, Leicester, Ludlow, Market Rasen, Musselburgh, Perth, Ripon, Sandown, Taunton and Wincanton. Goodwood, Hamilton and Salisbury have right-handed loops off straight courses, and Windsor is a figure of eight.

Is Cheltenham left-handed or right-handed?

Left-handed. So are Aintree, Newbury, Haydock and Leopardstown. Ascot, Sandown, Kempton, Punchestown and Fairyhouse are right-handed.

Which UK racecourses are all-weather?

Six: Chelmsford City, Kempton and Lingfield (Polytrack), and Newcastle, Southwell and Wolverhampton (Tapeta). Dundalk is Ireland's all-weather track.

What is the oldest racecourse in the UK?

Chester. Racing there is usually dated to 1539, and Guinness World Records recognises it as the oldest racecourse still in operation.

Other guides

• How to read horse racing form
• The big races and festivals
• Irish horse racing tips
• How to bet on horse racing
• Horse racing betting strategy
• Premium tips from the Winners Club