IT is the equine spectacles that raise the biggest eyebrows among visitors to York Racecourse’s treasure-laden archive room.

Do horses wear glasses I ask? “I suppose if they put one hoof over their eye they can see whether they need them,” giggles Dede Scott Brown, the long-time curator of the Knavesmire track’s collection of the weird and wonderful.

“We’ve got Voltigeur’s tail,” she continues and we admire the hindmost part of the 1850 St Leger winner, who lost out to The Flying Dutchman in York’s famous match race of 1851.

Voltigeur’s leg is a more grizzly addition to this collection of historical treasures but even its place in oddity was surpassed by a set of artefacts so bizarre they had to be given away.

“We did have three skins which belonged to St Simon, Donovan and Ayrshire,” Scott Brown explains. “They were in 14 foot by ten foot cases and they used to hang on the first floor of the Gimcrack rooms.

“People found them disgusting. What they did was get hold of the mouths and ripped off round the ears and all the skin came off. They were just hanging drapes with the tails tucked up.

“We had them right from the beginning. The Duke of Portland gave them to us but we took them down because people would always complain about them.

“Sir Mark Prescott, who loves anything quirky, now has them hanging in his foyer as you go through to his indoor riding stables at Newmarket. He was highly delighted.”

When you have been in existence since 1731 you accumulate a huge range of treasures and the archive room, housed in the committee rooms on the third floor of the Ebor Stand, has them poking out from every nook and cranny.

Racing calendars, old stud books, racecards through the decades, the very history of the thoroughbred is contained within these four walls.

Once there was a museum and Scott Brown arrived in 1978 to help with an exhibition of bronzes set up in a corridor in the old 1965 Stand. She never left.

“Every race day they had to take everything down and put it back into storage,” she remembers. “Then they got the old tote room on the fifth floor of the stand and opened it as a museum.

“It was a big room but there was a lot of light. Then they put a little restaurant up there and it made it a much darker room and it was wonderful for artefacts.

“When they took down the 65 Stand in 1999 we had to find somewhere else and there really wasn’t anywhere that was feasible.

“So everything was put into storage until about 2005 when it was suggested that we should have the glass case that is on the ground floor of the Ebor Stand.

“We just move around the artefacts in there.”

Scott Brown is fascinated by old things. She’s the type that, before the internet made antique hunting so easy, could happily trawl around shops hunting precious knick-knacks.

As we speak, Scott Brown is preparing for an appointment. A man whose father bred Cat O’ Nine Tails, the 1932 Ebor Handicap winner, wants to know more about the horse. She can tell him all about it.

So even though the racing museum has gone, the demand has remained. In her weekly trips to the archives, to sort new displays and bring new life to the old, Scott Brown has been in constant demand.

Leaving will be difficult.

“The thing about the racing museum was that it was quaint,” she says. “It was not like any other. It was amateur but it was also very, very attractive. It was peaceful.

“You could walk around, there were cases dedicated to the St Leger, or the Gimcrack, and various jockeys. You could go up and watch a race and come back without having to go through the routine of pressing buttons and everything else.

“But kids these days don’t read. They want to press buttons so they can watch and listen. All that costs money. I have been here 33 years and I think someone else ought to take over.

“Hopefully, I will be able to come and help out if they want me. It was a very hard decision to leave. When I wake up in the middle of the night and think of things it is always the museum of which I think. It’s just habit.

“I love the racecourse, I really do. I have had so much fun here and I have met some wonderful people and made some lovely friends. I am going to miss it a lot and I have loved single minute. I really have.”