Scottish Middle Distance Championships and SOL 1, 2025Dallaschyle and Lady Culbin, 22-23 March
Credit: Sally Lindsay
Around 30 ESOC members made the trip north to compete in the Scottish Middle Champs on Saturday, followed by the first Scottish Orienteering League race of 2025 on Sunday. Medallists from the ESOC contingent included two junior members.
The venue for Saturday's race was Dallaschyle, a forest about 10 miles east of Inverness. This event was staged by the Inverness Orienteering Club (INVOC).
Dallaschyle was first used in 1999 for the World Championships, where Yvette Hague won Britain's first WOC gold medal. It has been visited since for 6-Day events and SOLs, and has a reputation as a technical and physically tough area. The underfoot conditions were certainly very hard going with uneven ground, dead bracken and fallen trees. There were plenty of tracks and rides which the junior courses could use, but which the technical courses were planned to avoid, whilst the longer courses visited areas with a wealth of rock and contour detail.
Fortunately, the weather was warm and sunny and the convenient and large parking/assembly field meant that a good number of the three hundred or so folk in attendance stayed on for the prize-giving. Sadly, one of the controls had been wrongly placed. It was the penultimate control on all the technical courses other than courses 1 and 2. The times for the legs before and after the misplaced control were therefore deducted and those people who had missed it out altogether were reinstated.
The outstanding result from ESOC was the win in Women's Open for Rachel Brown, running as Edinburgh University. There were silver medals for Emma Daley in W14 and for Maria O'Hara in W12, and a bronze medal for Alison Harding in Women's Ultravet (W65/W70).
Other ESOC members in the top half of the results were:
- Women's Vet (25 competitors) Fran Daley 11th
- Women's Supervet (31) Helena Nolan 10th, Emma Anderson 15th
- Women's Ultravet (15) Mary Williams 5th, Margaret Dalgleish 7th
- Men's Ultravet (24) Richard Oxlade 4th, Kevin Harding 9th
- Men's Hypervet (17) Les Dalgleish 6th
Results for the Scottish Middle Championships are on the INVOC results page
The Scottish Orienteering League event at Lady Culbin had been anticipated with great relish, ever since word got around that this was a seldom visited part of Culbin in the extreme northeast of the area. At the 2023 6-Day event the very longest courses had sampled its delights but for the majority it had always been out of reach, presumably due to the unavailability of suitable parking. For this event Moravian Orienteers (MOR) had negotiated the use of a large field near Binsness House on the western shore of Findhorn Bay.
Similar to the rest of Culbin, well known to Scottish orienteers, the area consists of a vast expanse of finely contoured sand dunes, cloaked with pine forest. Runnability is mostly good although thinning operations had left significant debris, meaning that once again those with long legs and a high knee lift were at a considerable advantage!
Early morning rain caused most people to stay huddled in their cars as long as possible when they first arrived, but fortunately this soon cleared to leave dry conditions for the majority of the day, although never as warm and sunny as the Saturday had been. The 600m walk to the far start along a pretty woodland path beside a sandy beach was an absolute joy. The forest itself proved to be every bit as technical as anticipated, causing some very long times and a fair number of DNFs. Relocation, once contact with the map was lost, was tricky.
The following ESOC members were in the top half of the results:
- Brown (34 competitors) Ben Brown 9th, Rachel Brown 12th
- Blue (76) Keith Brown 16th
- Short Blue (68) Richard Oxlade 10th, Fran Daley 17th, Crawford Lindsay 23rd, Helena Nolan 25th, Emma Anderson 26th, Andrew Daley 32nd, Finlay Ross 33rd
- Green (45) Kevin Harding 1st, Alison Harding 3rd
- Short Green (24) Janice Nisbet 4th, Judy Bell 5th, Margaret Dalgleish 7th
- Very Short Green (15) Eleanor Pyrah 6th
- Light Green (24) William Atkinson 6th, Emma Daley 12th
Results for SOL 1, including Routegadget, are on the Moravian Orienteers results page.
Other entries categorised under: Event Reports
Other entries categorised under: Event Reports