Edinburgh Southern Orienteering Club

Turf - how things have changed!

Sally Lindsay looks at some Turf statistics for Edinburgh area. (This article was in the November issue of Capital-O.)

I’ve been delving around in the many statistics that are available via the Turf website, and thought you might like to see what I found, looking at how the turf landscape around Edinburgh has changed over the past year. There’s been an enormous increase in turf zones, and there are many more people taking part.

Area Number of zones Number of turfers
12/11/2020 Nov 2019 12/11/2020 Nov 2019
City of Edinburgh 805 240 66 6
East Lothian 298 13 26 1
Midlothian 259 2 23 0
West Lothian 230 9 10 0
Falkirk 244 10 6 2
Fife 355 73 6 0
Perth & Kinross 90 23 1 0

The chart above shows the number of turf zones for areas in and around Edinburgh - now, and a year ago. The zone-setters have been very busy indeed - see the maps below. More zones are still appearing on a daily basis. The maps give a striking illustration of the increase. So many new places to find!

The numbers playing have increased dramatically too. The chart shows numbers of active turfers in our local areas (note that people will be counted more than once, if they visited more than one area). In November 2019, there were only 9 turfers in the whole of Scotland, 5 of whom were Turf tourists, i.e. their home region wasn’t Scotland. (November’s probably not a very representative month – for comparison, there were 23 turfers in Scotland in August 2019, 14 of whom were Turf tourists.) There are currently 118 turfers in Scotland, with no tourists - the latest travel restrictions obviously affect this.

Turf zones in and around Edinburgh, November 2019

Turf zones in and around Edinburgh, November 2020

There are links to various third party sites (for Turf statistics) in the Third Party section of the Turf website info page.
The ones I used were:
Warded - Extensive statistics from the game, from game-wide to user-specific
UrbanGeeks - A map tool that provides extra information on zones

- Sally Lindsay

Other entries categorised under: Turf