September Social 2019Monday 2 September
A windy night in Western Edinburgh, with some excellent urban strategy score planning.
Peter Halling’s report on the September Social at the MacGregors’:
"Ewart Scott had arranged use of the Bughtlin and East Craigs map, an excellent bit of urban terrain with countless narrow passages between buildings, but a fair share of dead ends and uncrossable boundaries. He planned a “strategy score event” with a thought-provoking scoring system. The usual control sites of lampposts, hydrants and post boxes scored 10, 20 and 30 points respectively. But three of the lampposts were actually something different, and finding each of these gained a bonus score of 50 points. This required careful study of the description – at one site some had recorded a lamppost at the opposite side of the road, but the description pointed clearly to the location of a tree. The scoring meant lampposts on average were worth nearly 20 points, but it was luck whether you chose the 50 point ones. I have to admit giving up trying to make a clever calculation, and just went for as many controls as possible!
More than 20 of us started out on the runs, many despite the exertions of the Scottish Score the previous day. As we waited to start on the Maybury Road verge, a strong wind blowing drizzle had me wondering whether others dressed in windproof and waterproof jackets had got it right. Thankfully as soon as we got into the area the wind was broken by buildings and it stayed pretty dry.
Despite the map covering only about 1 by 0.6 km, the 33 controls were cunningly placed to avoid an obvious short route around them all (see map). Alison Cunningham managed to get to all but one control in winning the 60 min score, a pretty impressive performance. On the 40 min score, Janice Nisbet and Brian Yates running together had equal top scores.
After the run we were treated to a great spread of food by Jayne and Alan. As well as the usual post-run spotting of better control selections and route choices, plenty of other orienteering and other news was exchanged. As usual we were joined by a number of members who were not able to take part in the street event, but who made a big contribution to the lively discussions."
A copy of the map will be posted here very soon.
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