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The Trial GroundA dated record of British working-dog trials

Season 2026

The 2026 record

The 2026 season month by month: retriever and spaniel work, a nursery sheepdog course, canicross in the forest, carting, and an open trial on the moor.

A trials field in summer with a line of spectators along a rope, a dog working at distance and a judge standing beside a white marker post

The 2026 entries were written in the order the season runs them, which is the order that makes them easiest to read. British working-dog sport is not one calendar but four or five overlapping ones, and a year page is the only honest way to show how they interlock. Gundog field trials belong to the shooting season and stop when it stops. Working tests fill the gap with dummies through spring and summer. Sheepdog trials build from nursery classes in the dark months to open trials on the hill in high summer. Canicross and bikejor run the other way round again, because a dog cannot safely pull in the heat, so their season is the winter one.

Read down the year and the logic appears. January is a retriever field trial on real ground in real cold. February is an indoor working test, the same skills without game and without weather. March is a forest canicross course, a different sport entirely but the same question of what a fit dog can be asked to do. May is a nursery sheepdog trial, the first course a young dog ever runs. June is water. July is carting, the smallest discipline in this record and the one with the least formal structure in Britain. August closes the year on an open sheepdog course, which is where the whole vocabulary of outrun, lift, fetch, drive, shed, pen and single is finally used at full size.

Each entry answers one practical question and says where the rule it quotes comes from. Where a governing body publishes the regulation, the entry links to that regulation rather than to a summary of it. Where the practice varies from one organiser to the next, the entry says so instead of inventing a national standard.

In this section

  1. A wide moorland trial field in late summer with heather on the skyline, a line of parked cars along a rope and a shepherd alone at the post

    August: the open sheepdog season at its full size

    If there is one month to watch sheepdog work in Britain it is August. The diary carries more trials than any other month, and the four National trials fall inside three weeks of each other.

  2. A large black dog in a padded draught harness hitched to a two wheeled cart on a grass field, a handler walking alongside on a loose lead

    Carting and draught tests in Britain: small, but written down

    This is the smallest discipline in this record and the one people most often assume does not exist here. It does, it is carefully regulated, and the regulation belongs to three clubs of a single breed.

  3. A retriever swimming across a still pond towards the bank with reeds behind, ripples spreading, a handler waiting on the grass edge

    Working tests on water, and the certificate behind them

    The water test is the shortest exercise in gundog competition and one of the most consequential. Its definition is a single sentence, and the sentence does not contain the word retrieve.

  4. A working spaniel driving through a strip of rough grass and brambles with its tail moving, a steward with a clipboard standing at the edge

    Inside a spring spaniel working test

    A spaniel working test is a shooting day with the shooting taken out. The beat is marked, the gun fires blanks, the game is canvas, and the dog is asked to do exactly what it would do in November.

  5. A wide forest ride with soft muddy ruts and puddles between conifers, marker tape tied to a branch, low bright sun through bare birches

    Canicross in March: reading a forest trail at the end of a season

    The British dryland season runs from about September to May, and March is where it starts to close itself down. The trail is the same trail; the ground, the light and the air are not.

  6. A young black and white collie lying flat in short wet grass watching three sheep, a handler at a post in a bare winter field behind

    Nursery trials: a young dog in the dark months

    Nursery trials are where young sheepdogs first run in public, and they are almost invisible in the rulebook. The society that governs the sport does not publish a nursery course, and the local societies that do run them differ from one another.

  7. A retriever sitting steady in frosty stubble beside a handler in a waxed coat, breath showing in cold air, bare hedge and grey sky behind

    What a January retriever field trial asks of a dog

    January is the end of the shooting season and the hardest part of the retriever year. The ground is wet, the light is short, and the regulation that governs the day is at its most demanding about steadiness and about mouth.

The rest of the record runs either side of this season: 2025 and 2024. How the entries are written, and what the desk does not do, is set out on the about page.