SO WHAT can you buy at a traditional livestock market?

Bulls, cows, pigs, sheep of course. Perhaps, at a rustic affair, cheese and farmyard produce. But a racehorse? Unthinkable as it may seem but that's how Devon Envoy came into the hands of trainer Rod Millman.

The two-year-old, submitted at a market in Exeter, caught the eye of a local dairy farmer who talked friends into forming a syndicate under the unlikely name of Horniwinks Racing and approached Millman.

Now Devon Envoy has won two races, over five furlongs at Chepstow last season and this week over a furlong longer at Salisbury where he blitzed his rivals as soon as the stalls opened. Well clear at halfway, Millman understandably harboured fears that he might come back to the field.

Not a bit of it. He kept up the relentless gallop to win by two and three quarter lengths with the trainer full of praise for rider Ross Coakley.

"He is very much a horse who is best left to his own thing," explained Millman. "He's very much more mature now and has very left last year's form behind. Ross is a very good jockey, a very good judge of pace. There was a stage I thought they might catch him but Ross got his fractions right."

If there was one horse that surely could not be fancied, it was Ascraeus whose form notably tailed off last season, showed little on his reappearance in April and was 6lb out of the handicap in the one mile event, but the application of a visor rekindled his enthusiasm as he repeated last year's success in the same race - but only just, getting up in the last stride to thwart the long-time leader Bluenose Belle.

"Luke Morris was brilliant on him," praised Ian Mongan, trainer Laura Mongan's partner. "He's such a good rider and he threw everything at him."

Ascraeus had apparently become complacent and connections only resorted to fitting the visor as a last resort.

"We put it on him at home and he showed much more. I knew he would run his race but the problem with a visor it only works so many times and no more, and Luke suggested that next time, we should put blinkers on him."

Harry Eustace is very much one to have on your side in the last few weeks with seven winners out of his last 20 runners, prompting a remarkable £35 plus profit on a £1 basis, and the Newmarket trainer enhanced that envious record when Mystical Applause took the opening race.

Hayley Turner kept the two-year-old tucked behind the two pacemakers before switching him late to land the six-furlong test from market rival Zabbie by a neck.

"I got a nice lead from Andrea (Atzeni on Delerious Dream) and when I pulled him out, he picked up well," she reported. "He was a bit green on the bridle and is a bit babyish but I liked the way he galloped after the line."

Cabinet of Clowns was the best of a moderate bunch in the six-furlong maiden, gaining compensation for his luckless defeat at Lingfield when he was squeezed out at the start and didn't handle the hill.

"Just about everything went wrong there," jockey Charles Bishop conceded. "He's always been a horse that I have liked. Today he got into a nice rhythm and saw it out well."

Andrea Atzeni, who had the mile handicap snatched from his grasp, paid for his fuel bill from Newmarket when the favourite Soul Stopper ran on well to take the 12-furlong maiden.