A six-pound hike after the first, then another eight, then 10, 12, 14 and eight again. By the time the Irish National came round in April, Dun Doire was four stone worse off in the official ratings than he had when he won his first of the season at Wetherby back in November. It was like the handicapper was chasing him around like Benny Hill used to in those old naughty nurse sketches. But he always kept a step ahead before getting caught finally at Fairyhouse.

It was a remarkable run.

All you need to know about how his trainer is thought of in racing circles, however, is contained within the almost equally remarkable fact that once it started, it took until Cheltenham . . . the last of the six in a row . . . for Dun Doire not to go off as favourite.

Despite each race bringing a gradual rise in the weights, punters still took him to laugh it off each time. That included the Thyestes Chase at Gowran in January where the horse only got in on the morning of the race as first reserve. People clearly made up their mind . . . Dun Doire wasn't just a progressive type, he was one that Tony Martin saw something in.

And if Tony Martin thought it worth a look, that was good enough. Green light for go.

Ask around about Tony Martin and the same words come back to you almost every time. Shrewd. Clever.

Canny. Knows everything about his horses and what each of them can do. May not have known last November that he had a festival winner on his hands but would have known well that he was talking about a serial handicap winner at the very least. Oh, and with a dollop of wildness thrown in for good measure.

"Dun Doire just kept improving as he went along with himself, " he says of the horse he bred himself at home in Kildalkey, Co Meath.

"He was a nice age for it but it was like looking at a hurler who was a decent minor . . . he might not be worth a damn come 26 or he might be the best one in the land. Dun Doire is an old-fashioned National Hunt horse. He's not one of these nice horses off the flat who people think are going to be great because they can run at four or five years of age. This lad didn't even race until he was five, a proper National Hunt type.

"I was always hoping he'd make it into a nice staying chaser but there's no doubt that he exceeded our expectations. He won his point-topoint the year before and a couple of hurdle races too in the spring so we knew he'd probably progress because he was a nice jumper as well as everything. But at the start of the year we never thought he'd win at Cheltenham."

That win in the William Hill Plate brought the horse's earnings over that six-race period to a touch over 170,000. Not bad for a handicapper. But then, this is the bread of Martin's life. He's always looking for an angle for his horses, a race that might have slipped under the radar somehow. In his early training days in the mid- to late-90s, he made a name for himself picking up wins in Britain. In one two-year period, he saddled 22 winners from 46 runners over there, collecting more than £250,000 in prizemoney for his owners along the way.

Most of the time, he travelled over alone. Loaded up the lorry with whatever weaponry he had in mind for a particular job, sat in the driver's seat and turned the key. He was happy in his own company, easy in his own tranquillity. Ferry across from Dublin or Belfast, down the motorway to wherever the raid was on. In and out, each strike a surgical one.

The success rate was high and it wasn't accidental.

"I always had the problem that it was hard to get the opportunities in Ireland for middle-classed horses, " he explains. "There was so much racing over there and so much variety that you could find what you were looking for nearly any day of the week. If you wanted a twomile, three-furlong race on a left-handed track, you'd be sitting on your arse for a month in Ireland and by that stage, the conditions mightn't suit or whatever. So I found it far easier to look up the book, make your plan and head away off. I enjoyed it, getting away on my own.

"And the thing was, once you got there, the fields were more manageable. Instead of taking on a 24-maximum field and run the risk of getting balloted out like you would at home, there'd never be more than 14 or 15 lining up.

You wouldn't get the traffic problems in England that you would at home. You could be racing a 24-runner field in Navan or somewhere and someone gets too excited and falls at the first and brings down another three. You didn't get that over there."

By chipping away and chipping away like that, he built up a reputation for himself as someone who made possibilities stretch like tenners in a thrift store. He was sent a three-year-old called She's Our Mare in 1996. The horse was basically a leftover that nobody would take . . . his owner Denis Reddan couldn't get £300 for her at the time and she was partially blind in both eyes. By the time Martin finished training her in May 2000, she'd won 12 races between handicap hurdle and flat races, including the 1999 Cambridgeshire at Newmarket, and had brought home prizemoney in excess of £200,000. It was the best £300 anybody never got.

That's Martin, though. The idea of it being more about the size of the fight in the dog than vice-versa clearly sits easy with him. Dun Doire might have sailed through last season and might even win a Grand National one day but it won't stop him claiming the outsider's ground. His yard is getting stronger, but never strong enough. His employee list is longer, but never long enough.

"You're still doing the best you can with what you have, " he says. "If you're a yard in England with 50 horses, you're going to have 20 staff to take care of them. If you're a yard here with 50, you'll have 10. That's the difference.

Like I was saying, if I'm taking a horse over to England for a race, I'll drive the lorry myself but sure I'd say David Pipe and Paul Nicholls and these fellas wouldn't know how to find reverse on a lorry.

This is still Ireland, no matter how well you do. It's a military operation over there whereas here, you're still trying to do what you can."

And doing what he can entails, for today, taking Dun Doire to Liverpool for the Beecher Chase around the Grand National fences. The terms and conditions involved in hoping against hope you have a National contender come April do, of course, apply and he knows that too well. But like they say about him, he knows what he has and what he can do.

"Dun Doire's only seven now, he'll be eight next year so you'd be hoping that he'd be getting near the age now where he could take a serious run at it. We've always seen him as a National horse, touch wood. But you never know.

"Look at Xenophon [the Martin-trained winner of the 2003 Coral Cup]. He died as an eight-year-old in the Irish National having won at Cheltenham the year before. The world was at his feet at look what happened him. If this fella has the luck, he could race until he's 11 or 12 like David's Lad did and maybe, hopefully, have three or four nice whacks at winning it. If he was lucky enough to stay in one piece and get to Liverpool, I'd be delighted and I'd think he'd have his chance."

In Martin's hands, a chance is the least you'd expect.