Owner Robert Waley-Cohen and his jockey son, Sam, have enjoyed phenomenal success at jump racing’s top table this season.

Long Run’s stunning victories in the Cheltenham Gold Cup and the King George VI Chase plus Oscar Time’s gallant second in the John Smith’s Grand National have made it a magical three months for the Waley-Cohens.

But their roots are very much in point-to-point racing.

And they’ve been regular visitors from their family home at Edgehill, near Banbury, to meetings such as the popular Old Berkshire Hunt fixture at Lockinge, near Wantage, which takes place on Easter Monday.

Robert, who retires as chairman of the Point-to-Point Authority this year while at the same time becoming chairman of Cheltenham Racecourse, recalls his earliest memories of the sport with great fondness from his childhood on Exmoor.

“On the first weekend in May we went off to the point-to-point and that was enormous fun,” he says.

“My father was very keen on the racing and giving us money. He always said ‘don’t spend it on things like toffee apples, have a bet on the horses’ and they weren’t fussy about taking money off eight-year-olds.

“I used to enjoy it. It was a wonderful family day out.”

From those early beginnings, his love of the sport grew and continued to flourish while he was living and working in New York where he experienced timber racing at Far Hills in New Jersey.

Returning to the UK, he started riding in point-to-points and hunter chases.

“I was a very modest performer,” he says. “I achieved one win under National Hunt Rules on a horse called Sun Lion in the Town of Warwick Hunters’ Chase in 1981.”

Hanging up his riding boots in 1983, he went on to train point-to-pointers and hunter chasers.

Paul Webber, who now trains at Mollington, near Banbury, rode for him in those days.

More recently Waley-Cohen has enjoyed notable success with the likes of Katarino and Irilut.

Nicky Henderson trained the former to win the Triumph Hurdle under Mick Fitzgerald, before he returned to Waley-Cohen to win two John Smith’s Fox Hunter Chases at Aintree in Sam’s hands.

The Waley-Cohens have also enjoyed success at Lockinge. “Sam rode a winner on a horse I trained in the open race called Strong Chairman,” recalls Robert.

“It was his early schoolmaster and he also rode two winners for Alice Plunkett there.

“It is always a very good day out at Lockinge.”

Sam’s double for the Channel 4 presenter came on Lord Code and Menantol on a weekend in 2007 when he also gained a certain notoriety for hiring a yellow helicopter and flying to the meetings at Kimble and Lockinge where he is reported to have been charged a £200 parking fee – something Robert disputes.

“If they did, I don’t ever have a recollection of paying it,” he says vehemently.

However, he’s not sure if he will be at Lockinge this year as he isn’t having any runners over the Easter weekend with Sam serving a four-day ban.

Having fallen from Turko in the Fox Hunters’ Chase, Sam was among four jockeys who were handed suspensions for remounting and returning to the unsaddling area without their horses being examined by a racecourse vet.

It was a ban which Robert feels was excessive.

“I thought it defied commonsense,” he says. “At Aintree the distances are huge and I am glad to say in point-to-points riders are allowed to self-certify and remount their horses and ride back to the paddock.”

When he took over as chairman of what was then the Point-to-Point Board on January 1, 2005, the sport faced a highly uncertain future.

“The Hunting Act was coming into force six weeks later and obviously there was a lot of anxiety about what the future of point-to-pointing would be,” he adds.

“It all seems bizarre now because point-to-pointing is thriving with around 3,800 horses running in three-mile chases.

“I think we have truly modernised the whole administration of the sport and provided a huge amount of assistance to unpaid volunteers who have to deal with legal obligations.

“I think the sport now has taken control of its own fate.”