The Chair Fence: The Grand National's Tallest Obstacle
The Chair fence at Aintree explained for UK racing fans: the 15th and tallest Grand National obstacle, its open ditch, raised landing and name.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Grand National22 min read
- Fence number
- 15
- Published height
- 5ft 2in
- Times jumped in the National
- Once
- Landing above take-off
- About 6in
Five feet two inches of spruce, a ditch in front of it wide enough to lie down in, and a crowd of tens of thousands a few strides away. The Chair is the fifteenth fence of the Grand National at Aintree and the tallest obstacle on the course. Horses meet it once, at the end of the first circuit, directly in front of the stands, and on the far side they land on ground that is higher than the ground they left.
That is the direct answer to what the Chair is. It is an open ditch: a ditch with a low guard rail on the take-off side, then the fence itself, published by the Jockey Club, which owns the racecourse, at 5ft 2in high for the 2025 running. The ditch is quoted at about six feet wide in the same course guide, though older documents give a figure a few inches narrower. The landing side stands roughly six inches above the take-off. Becher's Brook is the more famous fence and the Canal Turn the more awkward one, but neither is as tall, and no other fence on the Grand National course asks a horse to rise and stretch in quite the same way.
The Chair fence in the Grand National: what the three measurements mean
Most fences can be described by one figure. The Chair needs three, and they work against each other.
The height
At 5ft 2in the Chair is two inches taller than any other fence on the National course. Several of the remaining fifteen are published at 5ft, and the plain fences at the start and finish of the circuit come down to 4ft 6in. Two inches does not sound much. It matters because the Chair is the only fence where the height comes with both a ditch in front and a rise behind.
As with every National fence, the figure is nominal. The top layer is loose spruce that a horse can brush through, so the solid part of the obstacle is lower than the published number. A horse that jumps the Chair well usually takes some green with it.
The ditch
The open ditch is what makes the height count. A horse approaching a plain fence can shorten its stride and pop over from close in, a technique riders call fiddling. At an open ditch there is no close in. Underneath the fence is a trench, guarded by a rail, and the horse has to take off on the near side of the rail and carry itself over ditch and fence in one arc.
The Jockey Club gives the ditch as six feet. Other published sources, some of them older, put it at a few inches less. The difference is real and is partly explained by how a ditch is measured: from the face of the guard rail to the face of the fence, or from edge of turf to edge of turf. Either way, a horse clearing the Chair is travelling well over twelve feet through the air before it touches down.
The landing
Becher's Brook drops away on the landing side. The Chair does the reverse. The ground beyond it is about six inches higher than the ground in front, so a horse that has judged its arc for level ground meets the turf sooner than it expected. The effect is a jolt rather than a fall, and it tends to pitch the rider forward up the horse's neck. Jockeys who have been unseated at the Chair often describe exactly that: the horse jumped it, then stopped dead on landing.
| Measurement | Published figure | What it tests |
|---|---|---|
| Height of fence | 5ft 2in | The rise needed to clear the solid part |
| Ditch on take-off side | About 6ft, with a guard rail | Whether the horse can stand off and jump out |
| Landing side | About 6in higher than take-off | Balance when the ground arrives early |
| Width across the course | The narrowest of the big fences | Room for a bunched field to find a line |
| Number of times jumped | Once, as fence 15 | Nothing on the second circuit |
- 15Fence number
- 62Height in inches
- 6Landing raised by inches
- 1Times jumped in the race
Jockey Club published dimensions. Heights of spruce fences are nominal because the top is loose.
Why the Chair is jumped only once
The answer lies in where the Chair sits, not in any decision to spare the horses. The fence stands on the main line of the course in front of the stands, at the point where the first circuit sweeps back towards the start, and the Water Jump sits a short gallop beyond it on the same line.
On the first circuit the field arrives at the thirteenth and fourteenth fences on the racecourse proper, having crossed the Melling Road from the country. It jumps them, carries on straight, meets the Chair and then the Water Jump, and bends left past the enclosures to set out again for the first fence, which now becomes the seventeenth.
The second circuit cannot follow the same path, because the winning post is not beyond the Water Jump. After the thirtieth fence, which is the fourteenth jumped a second time, the runners are guided by a rail off to the right of the Chair. They pass it on their left with nothing to jump. Roughly halfway along the 494-yard run-in the course angles back at a point called the Elbow, and the field straightens for the line. A race that jumped the Chair twice would need a different finish.
- First circuit, fences 13 and 14Two plain fences on the racecourse proper after the Melling Road crossing
- First circuit, fence 15The Chair, an open ditch with a raised landing, in front of the stands
- First circuit, fence 16The Water Jump, a low fence with a pool on the landing side
- Turn past the standsThe field bends left and heads out on the second circuit towards fence 17
- Second circuit, fences 29 and 30The same two plain fences, now the last two of the race
- The run-inA rail steers the runners right of the Chair, through the Elbow and on to the winning post
Fence numbers as used in the Grand National. Other races over these fences start in different places.
There is a consequence for the race that is easy to miss. The Chair comes at the moment the field is most tightly packed in the race's opening four miles. After fourteen fences most of the runners are usually still standing, the early charge has settled into a rhythm, and the plain thirteenth and fourteenth have let the stragglers close up. The tallest fence on the course is therefore met by something close to a full field. Becher's on the second circuit, by contrast, is met by whoever is left.
The other thing to say is that riders know it is coming. On the run from the fourteenth a jockey can see the Chair square in front, see the crowd behind it, and decide which part of the fence to aim for. That is not a luxury every fence on the course allows. The order of all sixteen, and how the other fourteen are met on both circuits, is laid out in our full guide to the Grand National fences.
Why it is called the Chair, and why it was once the Monument
Racing in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England was often decided in heats. A race might be run three or four times over the same distance on the same afternoon, and the horse that won two heats, or some agreed number, took the prize. To keep the field manageable, a horse that performed too badly in one heat was eliminated from those that followed.
The mechanism was the distance. A post stood a fixed distance from the winning line, conventionally 240 yards, and a judge was stationed beside it. When the winner of a heat passed the post, any horse that had not yet reached the distance judge was said to be distanced. It was out.
The distance judge at Aintree sat in a chair. The chair stood beside the fence in front of the stands, and the fence took its name from the seat. Heats were already dying out by the time the Grand National was established, and the role of distance judge disappeared with them, but the name outlived both. The phrase "distanced" survives in racing English too, in the sense of a horse beaten an enormous margin, and modern results still use "a distance" for any gap too large to measure in lengths.
The older name
In nineteenth-century accounts the same fence is sometimes called the Monument. Where that name came from is less certain than where "the Chair" came from, and the published histories do not agree on a single explanation, so this page does not offer one. What can be said is that the two names coexisted for a time and that "the Chair" won, perhaps because it described something racegoers could see.
There is a small irony in the history. The judge who gave the fence its name was there to decide which horses were too far behind to continue. The fence he lent it to has done the same job by other means ever since.
How the Chair is ridden at racing pace
A jockey who has ridden round Aintree will tell you that the problem with the Chair is not the size. It is what the size does to a horse's eye.
Coming off the fourteenth, the horse sees a wall of green directly ahead, taller than anything it has met so far, with the stands rising behind it. On a big day the noise from those stands arrives at the same time. Horses that have been jumping fluently for two miles sometimes back off, losing momentum, and a horse that backs off an open ditch is in trouble because it can no longer reach the far side.
So the rider's first job is to keep the horse travelling. Not faster. Just even. A steady, lengthening stride on the approach gives the horse a chance to see the right take-off point, and the right take-off point at an open ditch is well back, on the far side of the guard rail.
The guard rail and the take-off board
Two things help the horse judge it. The guard rail in front of the ditch gives a clear, low marker, and a horse that respects it will take off behind it. Then there is the take-off board, the coloured strip along the base of the fence that gives a horse a ground line, a visible bottom edge from which to measure its jump. After the 2011 review the boards on the National fences were raised from nine inches to fourteen so that the line would be easier to read, and the Chair received the same treatment as the rest.
A horse that "sees a stride" from a long way out at the Chair usually jumps it beautifully. A horse that gets too close is in serious trouble: the rail and ditch are under its front feet and it has to rise almost vertically to clear 5ft 2in, then land on rising ground with no momentum. That combination produces the classic Chair fall, the horse clearing the fence but crumpling on landing.
The rider's position
Most National riders sit slightly further back than they would over a park fence, and they let the reins slip through their fingers on landing so the horse has its head free. At the Chair that slip has to be early. Because the ground comes up sooner than at a level fence, a rider who is still balanced for a normal landing gets thrown forward.
The comparison with the fences out in the country is instructive. Becher's punishes the horse that lands steeply. The Canal Turn punishes the rider who misjudges the angle. The Chair punishes the horse that loses confidence on the approach. Each needs its own kind of jumper, and the horses that complete the National tend to be the ones that can do all three. The page on Becher's Brook covers the drop at the sixth in equal detail.
The narrowest of the big fences, and the pile-up of 1979
Out in the country the National fences are wide. A field of thirty-odd runners can spread itself across the take-off side of Becher's or Valentine's and each horse can find a line of its own. The Chair is noticeably narrower across the course, a feature of where it sits between the rails in front of the stands, and the field that has fanned out across the plain thirteenth and fourteenth has to funnel in.
This would matter less if the field were strung out. It is not. At the fifteenth, as described above, a large proportion of the runners are still going and many are tightly bunched. They converge on a narrower obstacle at racing pace with jockeys trying to keep a clear sight of the fence. Any horse that changes its line, refuses or runs across the front of the fence has the potential to stop several others at once.
1979
That is what happened in the 1979 race, the year Rubstic became the first Scottish-trained winner of the National. On the first circuit, loose horses that had already lost their riders came to the Chair with the main group and ran across the take-off side instead of jumping. The runners behind them had nowhere to go. Horses were brought down, others were baulked and refused, and a cluster of runners was put out of the race in a few seconds. Two loose horses were involved, and the usual count of runners put out is nine, though accounts differ by one or two depending on whether a horse that refused and was pulled up later is included. Kintai, one of the horses caught up in it, was injured and had to be put down. After that race, channels were made beside the fence so that a loose horse could run round it rather than across its face.
Very few of those horses made a jumping error of their own. The result shows them as brought down or refused rather than as fallers, and the distinction matters to anyone reading the form afterwards. It is the same pattern that produced Foinavon's year in 1967 at a much smaller fence, and the same lesson: on the National course the danger is less often the obstacle than the animal without a rider beside you. Remounting has since been banned under the Rules of Racing, which means a rider put on the floor at the Chair now stays out of the race.
The Chair, Paddy Farrell and the Injured Jockeys Fund
In the 1964 Grand National the jump jockey Paddy Farrell, riding Border Flight, fell at the Chair. He broke his back. He did not ride again.
A few months earlier Tim Brookshaw, a top-class jump jockey who had finished second in the National on Wyndburgh in 1959, had also broken his back in a fall at Aintree. Two leading riders paralysed within a short space of time, both at the same racecourse, and with almost no organised means of supporting them, exposed something the sport had preferred not to look at. Jump jockeys were self-employed. There was no fund for them.
The response came from inside racing. An appeal was launched for the two men in 1964, with the journalist and amateur rider John Lawrence, later Lord Oaksey, among those who drove it. The money raised went beyond what the two riders needed, and the appeal became a permanent charity. It was first known by the riders' names and before long as the Injured Jockeys Fund.
The fund still exists and its work has broadened a long way from its founding purpose. It supports jockeys, Flat and jumps, who have been injured, those who have retired, and their families, with financial help, medical care, rehabilitation and long-term support. It runs rehabilitation and fitness centres used by working riders as well as injured ones: Oaksey House in Lambourn, Jack Berry House in Malton and a third centre in Newmarket named after the commentator Sir Peter O'Sullevan. A rider coming back from a broken collarbone is as likely to pass through one of those buildings as a rider whose career has ended.
That is a long way from the Chair. But the connection is direct, and racing people make it themselves when they talk about the fence.
Joseph Wynne, 1862
The fence has a darker entry in its record from much earlier. In the 1862 race Joseph Wynne, riding O'Connell, fell at the obstacle in front of the stands, on the site of what is now the Chair, and died of his injuries. Contemporary newspaper accounts placed the fall there, and Wynne is usually recorded as the only rider to have been killed in a fall during the Grand National itself. The Victorian press treated the death as a reason to question the race. The race went on.
The Chair against the third, the eleventh and a park-course open ditch
There are three open ditches on the Grand National course. The third and the eleventh are jumped twice each, as fences three and nineteen and eleven and twenty-seven. The Chair is jumped once.
On paper they look similar. Each is a ditch with a guard rail, then a spruce fence. In practice they ask different things, and the differences are mainly height, landing and timing.
| Feature | Fence 3 and 19 | Fence 11 and 27 | Fence 15, the Chair | Regulation park-course open ditch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Published height | 4ft 10in or 5ft; published figures differ | 4ft 10in since 2024 | 5ft 2in | At least 4ft 6in under BHA standards |
| Dressing | Spruce over a core | Spruce over a core | Spruce over a core | Packed birch |
| Landing side | Level | Modified with the 2024 changes | About 6in higher than take-off | Level |
| Where it is met | Early, among a fresh field | On the canal side, after Valentine's | In front of the stands | Anywhere on the circuit |
| Times jumped in the race | Twice | Twice | Once | Varies by race |
The third is the first open ditch most of the field have seen on this course, and it comes early, while horses are still fresh and the pace is high. Its danger is enthusiasm. The eleventh comes after Becher's, the Canal Turn and Valentine's, and on the second circuit it is met by horses that have covered more than three miles. It was lowered by two inches for the 2024 race, to 4ft 10in. The Chair is taller than both, has the rising landing, and is met in the noise of the stands.
The park-course comparison
A regulation open ditch at Cheltenham, Sandown or on Aintree's own Mildmay course is built to the BHA's specification for steeplechase fences: packed birch, at least 4ft 6in high, with a ditch and guard rail in front. It is stiff. A horse that hits the top of one is slowed or turned over, which is why park-course jumping is about precision.
National fences are wider from front to back, softer on top, and taller. A National open ditch is an exaggerated version of the park one, but the softer top changes the technique. Our explainer on the difference between hurdles and fences sets out what a standard British fence is built to do.
The Water Jump beside it, and why the pair work as one set piece
The sixteenth fence is the opposite of the fifteenth in nearly every respect. The Water Jump is 2ft 6in high, the lowest fence on the course, with a wide pool of water on the landing side. It is a test of length, not height. A horse that jumps it long clears the water; one that jumps it short splashes a hind leg in. Falls are rare.
It stands close to where a stone wall was jumped in front of the stands in the first Grand National of 1839. The wall did not last, and water took its place within the race's first few years.
Why they are treated together
For the crowd, the Chair and the Water Jump are the part of the first circuit they can see without a screen. The field comes off the far side of the course, crosses the Melling Road, jumps two plain fences and then arrives, at full stretch, at the tallest and lowest obstacles of the day within a few seconds of each other. One is a test of nerve, the other a photograph. Television directors cut to the stands camera for both, and the press photographers line up at the Water Jump for the spray.
There is a jumping logic to the pairing as well. A horse that has jumped the Chair badly, landing on the rising ground and losing its rhythm, has very little distance in which to recover before the Water Jump. Most do recover, because the Water Jump is forgiving. But a horse that has had a fright at the fifteenth sometimes jumps the sixteenth gingerly, and a gingerly jump over a wide expanse of water is how a hind leg gets wet.
The Water Jump has its own small place in the race's history. It was beside the place where the Water Jump stands that Devon Loch collapsed on the run-in in 1956, within sight of the post, and one of the explanations offered afterwards was that the horse had tried to jump a shadow of the fence. That theory is unproven, like the others, but it shows how much the two fences in front of the stands are part of the way the race is remembered. The run-in itself, and the Elbow, are covered in our explainer on how the Grand National works from start to finish.
Where the Chair comes in the Topham, the Foxhunters' and the winter races
The Grand National is not the only race that meets the Chair. The spruce fences are raced over a few times a year, and in the shorter races the Chair arrives very early.
The Topham Chase, a handicap for professional riders on the Friday of the April meeting, and the Foxhunters' Chase, restricted to amateur riders on the Thursday, are each run over about two miles and five furlongs. The early-winter meeting stages the Grand Sefton over the same trip. On the start positions used in recent years, these races begin on the racecourse proper before the thirteenth fence. The field jumps the thirteenth and the fourteenth and then meets the Chair as the third fence of the race.
That changes its character. In the National the Chair comes after fourteen fences, when horses have learned how the spruce rides. In the Topham, the Foxhunters' and the Grand Sefton it comes after two, often to horses that have never jumped a National fence before, and with a full field still fresh and close together. The ditch, the height and the landing are all unchanged. The horse's experience of the course is almost nil.
The Becher Chase, run over a little more than three miles at the same winter meeting, starts further back on the course and meets the Chair after a longer run, though still well before the point it occupies in the National.
| Race | Usual meeting | Approximate distance | Where the Chair comes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grand National | April | 4 miles 2 furlongs 74 yards | Fence 15 of 30 |
| Topham Chase | April | 2 miles 5 furlongs | Third fence on recent start positions |
| Foxhunters' Chase | April | 2 miles 5 furlongs | Third fence on recent start positions |
| Grand Sefton Chase | Early winter | 2 miles 5 furlongs | Third fence on recent start positions |
| Becher Chase | Early winter | About 3 miles 2 furlongs | Earlier than in the National, later than in the shorter races |
A caution on the numbering. Start positions can be moved, and they have been, so the fence on which the Chair falls in these races is a recent pattern and not a law of the course. The approximate distances are those published for the races in the 2020s.
The Foxhunters' deserves a word of its own. Its riders are amateurs, many of them riding over the National fences for the first and only time, on horses qualified from point-to-points and hunter chases. For them the Chair, as the third fence, is the first serious question of a race they have spent a season preparing for. It has unseated some very good amateurs. More on the April meeting's three days and how the National-course races fit into it is in our Aintree racecourse guide.
What has been changed at the Chair, and what has stayed
The height has not moved. Through every round of changes to the National course since the 1960s, the Chair has stayed the benchmark: the tallest fence, the open ditch, the rise on landing. What has changed is almost everything around that height.
| Date | Change affecting the Chair |
|---|---|
| Early 1960s | Take-off sides of the National fences sloped so they are no longer upright |
| 2012 | Take-off boards raised from nine inches to fourteen across the National fences |
| 2013 | Rigid timber cores replaced by flexible plastic in twelve of the sixteen fences |
| 2024 | Standing start and a shorter run to the first, changing the pace at which the field arrives |
The slope
Until the early 1960s the fences were upright, like a wall, and a horse that got too close met a vertical face. Sloping the take-off side gave horses room for error at every fence, and at the Chair, where getting too close is the main danger, the effect was larger than anywhere else.
The core
The 2013 change, in which flexible plastic replaced the timber frames at the heart of twelve fences, gets the most attention. Published accounts of that change agree on the number and are less consistent about which four fences kept their old construction, so this page does not claim to know which kind of core the Chair has had since then. What all accounts agree on is the principle. A horse that hits the base of a fence now meets something that gives.
The dressing
The spruce has not changed in kind. It is still Norway spruce brought from the Lake District, packed into the frame and left loose on top. At the Chair, the fence builders take particular care with the face, because the open ditch means the horse sees the take-off side for longer than at a plain fence.
The take-off board and the landing
The raising of the take-off boards after the 2011 review applied across the course. The landing area of the Chair is a different matter. Several other fences have had their landing areas altered since 2011, Becher's Brook the best known of them. The Chair's raised landing has been kept as part of the test, in the same way that Becher's has kept a reduced drop.
The judgement this page would draw is that the Chair has been changed less than any other big fence on the course, and that this is deliberate. A course that has softened its cores, levelled its landings and shortened its run to the first fence still keeps one obstacle that is unmistakably the biggest, and it puts that obstacle in front of the crowd. The race has kept its signature. Whether keeping it was right is the argument that comes round every April. More of our explainers on English and British sport, from the racecourse to the football pitch, are collected on the England hub.