SSOF 2025Pittencrieff Park, Dunfermline, 5 June
It was largely warm and sunny for the 2023 Scottish Schools’ Orienteering Festival with only a short period of drizzly rain, and ESOC juniors had a great time, with several podium places.
David Robertson reports:
"The Scottish Schools’ Orienteering Festival is an annual event in the first week of June. This year the date was changed to a Thursday to avoid the clash with athletics competitions on the following day. The event took place at Pittencrieff Park in Dunfermline, another new venue for the SSOF.
Pittencrieff Park was a gift to the town from the Dunfermline-born philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and it is known locally as The Glen. In general the park slopes from north to south and is largely open parkland with many mature trees and ornamental gardens, The Laird’s Garden and Italian Garden, which were both out of bounds. Only the senior courses visited the steep sided, tree lined slopes of Tower Burn which winds roughly north – south. Registration and download was held in the large glasshouse.
There were many of the regular SSOF volunteers present ensuring the event ran smoothly and these included ESOC’s Judy Bell and Margaret & Les Dalgleish. Kingdom of Fife Orienteers supplied Pauline McAdam as organiser and Ian Doig as planner. Blair Young was controller. Heidi Ross was there in her role as SOA Development Officer and helped run a very popular maze on the lawns in front of the 17th century Pittencrieff House.
As usual, there were teams from schools all over Scotland, and nearly 400 pupils took part in this year’s Festival. The competition classes are based on academic year, from P5 upwards. There are team trophies for each competition class, worked out from the total time of the best 3 results for the same school.
Special credit from an ESOC perspective goes to Elspeth Bleakley who brought 71 pupils from George Heriot’s Junior School after giving them taster sessions and signposting them to local events."
Results for ESOC juniors:
- P5/6 Boys - Seb Bleakley 3rd, Eddie Mair 21st
- P5/6 Girls - Cerys Vernon and Emma Heron 3rd=
- P7 Boys - Fraser MacKenzie 30th
- P7 Girls - Maria O'Hara 4th, Arielle Muir 6th, Ianthe Bleakley 7th
- S1 Boys - Rohan Arnold 9th, David Inglis 10th, Kyle Crawford 13th
- S2 Boys - William Atkinson 4th, Iain Moir 8th
- S2 Girls - Emma Daley 4th
- S3 Boys - Ewan Arnold 3rd
- S3 Girls - Ursula MacColl 7th
- S4 Boys - Calum Robertson 5th, Jamie Crawford 7th
- S4 Girls - Alexis Gow 4th, Thea Thomas 5th
- S5/6 Boys - Tate Woodhouse 7th
- S5/6 Girls - Megan Brown 4th , Rachel Rose 6th, Lucy Sneddon 13th
There is a report and podium photographs on the Scottish Orienteering website.
Further details about the event are on the Scottish Schools Orienteering Association website, and the SSOF 2025 results are here.
Other entries categorised under: Schools - Juniors - Event Reports