Great Meadow is a 374-acre conserved events center in The Plains, Virginia, just outside Warrenton, best known as the permanent home of the Virginia Gold Cup steeplechase. It’s the beating heart of a much bigger story, though — a landscape of stone-walled lanes, working horse farms, and century-old hunt clubs that make up Virginia’s famed Hunt Country. If you’ve ever wondered why people in tweed jackets are jumping horses over hedges an hour from Washington, D.C., this is where the answer lives.
What Exactly Is Great Meadow?
Despite the name association with Warrenton (the county seat and cultural anchor of the area), Great Meadow technically sits in The Plains, a few miles up the road. It’s a nonprofit, not a park in the state or national sense. Great Meadow is a 374-acre open space in the heart of Virginia’s Horse and Hunt Country, and the land was placed under a conservation easement so it stays open, undeveloped, and dedicated to community and equestrian use forever, rather than becoming another subdivision.
That’s not a small detail — it’s the entire reason the place exists.
How a Threatened Farm Became Virginia’s Steeplechase Capital
The story starts nowhere near The Plains. In 1922, eight sportsmen from Warrenton got together and organized a four-mile race and offered a challenge trophy to be kept permanently by the owner whose horse could win the race three times, and a month later they ran the first Virginia Gold Cup with nine horses at the Oakwood estate off Waterloo Road. By 1924 the race had outgrown that spot and moved to Broadview Farm near Warrenton, where it would be its home for the next 50 years.
Broadview couldn’t last forever. As Warrenton grew, the lease on that increasingly valuable land became impossible to sustain, and by the early 1980s the Gold Cup needed somewhere new to run. News executive and philanthropist Arthur W. “Nick” Arundel found a 500-acre tract about ten miles north of the old course — an overgrown, swampy former dairy farm locals called the “old crayfish field.” He bought it at a bankruptcy auction on the steps of the Fauquier County courthouse and gifted it to a foundation, on the condition it stay open space forever rather than the 500-home development it had been slated to become.
The Gold Cup made the move in 1985, after fifty years at Broadview, running its 60th edition on the new course. Arundel went on to chair both Great Meadow and the Gold Cup for nearly two decades. He also founded the Piedmont Environmental Council, and he’s remembered today with a bronze statue on the property’s Members Hill — he died in 2011, and the land he saved was formally placed under conservation easement with Fauquier County in 2014.
Race Day at Great Meadow
The Virginia Gold Cup runs the first Saturday in May and is often called Virginia’s answer to the Kentucky Derby. What began as a single race with nine horses in 1922 has grown into an annual nine-race card that attracts a sellout crowd of more than 65,000 people. The race hit its 100th running in May 2025, and its 101st in May 2026, with the course itself getting continual upgrades from the Great Meadow Foundation.
The fences here are notably tougher than the old Broadview layout — taller, and demanding more speed and stamina from horse and rider over the full four-mile course. There’s a second big date on the calendar too: the International Gold Cup, held every third Saturday in October, which brings the same jump-racing drama with a cooler, autumn feel.
Beyond the two Gold Cup weekends, Great Meadow stays busy nearly year-round. The grounds include four ponds, a small open-air stadium, and the Shelia C. Johnson Grass Polo Field, home to a Saturday-evening Twilight Polo series that runs from spring through fall and has become one of the property’s most beloved traditions.
Point-to-Points: The Quieter Cousin of the Gold Cup
If Gold Cup day sounds a little overwhelming — and with tens of thousands of spectators, it can be — the local hunt clubs run smaller, low-key “point-to-point” races most weekends each spring. As one local writer put it, Point to Points are a less crowded, less formal, way to experience the thrill of horses racing over fences in a low-key, more intimate atmosphere, and you can get much closer to the action than at a major meet. The Warrenton Hunt runs its own point-to-point each March at the Airlie Race Course just outside town, part of a circuit that also includes the Rappahannock, Piedmont Fox Hounds, Old Dominion, Blue Ridge, Loudoun, and Middleburg hunts at their own courses through the spring.
The Hunt Country Surrounding Great Meadow
Great Meadow doesn’t exist in isolation — it’s one landmark inside a much larger cultural landscape that locals simply call Hunt Country. This stretch of Fauquier and Loudoun counties, roughly between Washington Dulles and the Blue Ridge, is where the Colonial tradition of fox hunting still reigns, and where horse farms are still bordered by the same stone fences that have lined these roads for generations.
Fox hunting isn’t nostalgia theater here — it’s a living tradition with real institutional weight. The Warrenton Hunt itself has been active since 1887, describing itself as one of the oldest active fox hunting organizations in the US, meeting three mornings a week each hunting season across Fauquier, Culpeper, and Rappahannock counties. Not far away in the Middleburg/Upperville area, the Piedmont Fox Hounds — founded in 1840 by 20-year-old Richard Henry Dulany — holds the title of oldest continuously operating hunt in the country. The whole sport is governed nationally by the Masters of Foxhounds Association, formed in 1907 when six masters met at New York’s Waldorf Astoria specifically to settle disputes over hunting territory.
That need for open, unbroken land is exactly why hunt clubs, conservation groups, and Great Meadow’s own foundation are so tightly linked. Because fox hunting depends on large expanses of open countryside, the hunts themselves have become some of the fiercest advocates for keeping this land undeveloped — the same instinct that saved Great Meadow from becoming a housing tract in the first place.
Driving the Trails Yourself
You don’t need a horse to see any of this. A loop drive through The Plains, Marshall, Delaplane, and Upperville strings together exactly the scenery that makes the area famous: rolling hills, working farms, stone-fenced roads, vineyards, orchards, and peaceful parklands. Hopewell Road out of The Plains is a particular favorite for its stone walls and, come autumn, its color. Pair a slow drive with a stop at a local winery or farm store, and you’ve got a full day that never strays far from Great Meadow’s front gate.
Visiting Great Meadow
Great Meadow is first and foremost an event venue, so the best way to experience it is to time your visit around something happening on the calendar — a Gold Cup weekend, a point-to-point nearby, or a Twilight Polo evening in summer. Outside of ticketed events, the open, grassy grounds and their four ponds make for a scenic if informal walk, though there aren’t dedicated hiking trails or facilities the way you’d find at a state park. Think of it less as a hiking destination and more as the anchor point for exploring the horse-and-hound culture that defines this corner of Virginia — a place where a 1980s land rescue turned into one of the region’s proudest traditions.
NOTE TO THE ADVENTURER: This guide is meant to spark curiosity for what lies beyond the horizon — not to serve as a guarantee. Roads fall into disrepair, buildings are torn down and rebuilt, and properties change hands; 'tis your responsibility to do your own research before setting out. Always heed local and regional law, and always respect ground that isn't your own. Take every entry here as a suggestion, not a decree. This guide's contents were gathered with the aid of artificial intelligence, and like any scout, it will from time to time lead you astray. You assume all risk in following its counsel, and neither this blog nor its author is liable for any loss, injury, or misfortune that results.
