Sunshine, big crowds and the Royal wedding combined to make this year’s Devon County Show the happiest and most successful for many years.

The Westpoint showground was packed on all three days, as more than 90,000 visitors enjoyed the magnificent livestock, a vast range of top quality locally produced food and drink and a host of trade stands and other attractions.

Ollie Allen, who, after 22 years, had his last show as show secretary, said: "I don’t think I can remember a sunnier show, or a happier one. The mood throughout has been one of celebration, of the Royal wedding, of course, but also of Devon food, farming and rural life, and all that it means to our beautiful county.

“I would like to thank all the thousands of volunteers who have made the Devon County Show what it has been over the last 22 years and have made my role the pleasure and privilege it has been. I am so proud of what we have achieved together and of what the Show means to Devon.”

The Burke Trophies - the blue riband of British cattle breeding - were judged at the Devon County for the first time, with the beef trophy going to the British Blues, and the dairy trophy to the Holsteins, with the Limousins and Jerseys in second place respectively.

The winning British Blue pair were a bull, NewPole Lorenzo, shown by Phil White and Jools Turner of the NewPole herd at Wellington, and Nat Doble’s heifer, High Ridge Blues Lucia from St Agnes in Cornwall. It is the first time that the Burke Trophy has been won by the British Blues.

The triumphant Holsteins were shown by Roland Ley, of Ley and Partners of the Thuborough Herd at Sutcombe near Holsworthy and Ollie Reed, of the Beaconhill herd at Blackborough near Cullompton.

NFU vice president Stuart Roberts visited on the Friday and used the platform to explain that food production needs to be the man driver of the government’s post-Brexit agricultural policy, if the environment and other ‘public goods’ are to be delivered, not the other way around.

It was theme taken up by show president Edward Darke, who said: “Farming is a major productive industry, with food production at its heart, which is the engine of the rural economy. Our politicians need to remember that, instead of giving the impression, as some of them do, that farming’s main output is environmental management, with food production as just a slightly inconvenient by-product.”