Olympic gold medalist Mark Phillips has been announced as the new course designer for this year's Gillespie McAndrew Hopetoun International Horse Trials, taking over from Ian Stark.

The event, taking place from July 27-28, has three CIC classes ranging from one to three-star. Mark Phillips was part of the Great Britain gold medal winning team at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and silver winning team at Seoul in 1988. He has since been designing courses, including Burghley and Luhmuhlen and is looking forward to his first course building stint at Hopetoun. Fellow Seoul team mate Ian Stark has built at Hopetoun since its inaugural event in 2011, but has been invited to build the 2015 European Championships course at Blair Castle so decided to step back at Hopetoun.

"Today is my first visit to the course, there will be a couple of layout changes," explained Mark. "The start will be moved to take in better ground and there will be a split start and finish. Scotty has done a good job and if it's not broke then don't fix it!

"There's a lot of permanment fixtures at Hopetoun that we'll work around, and the water jump will remain fairly difficult."

"It was a greenfield site two years ago and we didn't want to spend huge amount of money to find out what didn't work," explained organiser Stuart Buntine.

"There will be several notable changes this year, the Trustees of the house are allowing us to hold the showjumping phase on the west lawn. Both days there will be showjumping in the morning on the lawn and the stabling will also move inside the estate wall. The location has a huge potential to attract the non horse market, but at the centre of the event is the horse trials.

"This year we are looking at quality over quanity and entries will be limited to 120 horses each day."