Castlelaw

ESOC local event in Edinburgh and the Lothians with an extra course, Long Green, 10k

Sat 14th Apr 2018

Type of event: Local
Near: Penicuik

Winsplits are here

ORGANISER’S COMMENTS: Janet Clark writes: The day of this event was an unbelievably lovely surprise, truly the first day of spring! The prospects hadn't looked good during the week before, with sleet and low cloud making it very hard to check and tape control sites. But all that was forgotten as the sun shone, the fields and hill rapidly filled up with new-born lambs (100 were born that day) and everyone from experienced hill runners to beginner families enjoyed their runs. The addition of a 10km course was popular; and we'll do this again on the Pentlands.
We're very grateful to the shepherd who tolerates us at this time of year, and, as ever, to the small but hard-working team of ESOC members who made the event possible.

A super area for orienteering at all skill levels. At this event we will have the usual courses (including a Green course) plus a 10k Long Green course. Something for absolutely everyone.

Image of the Linn of Tummel & Clunie map

Linn of Tummel SOL

Scottish Orienteering League event

Sun 08th Apr 2018

Type of event: National
Near: Pitlochry

String results are here

Results are here

Winsplits are here

Routegadget is here

LOST PROPERTY: a pair of icebug shoes in a JOK Chasing Sprint shoe bag and Star Wars themed Buff left on one of the buses. The buff has yet to make its way back to Edinburgh but will be back later this week. Contact Roger Scrutton by email to: if either of these items belong to you or anyone in your family to arrange return.

ORGANISER'S COMMENTS: Roger Scrutton writes: Despite the organisation of the event being approximately Plan E, on the day everything worked out well, including some beautiful spring weather, and I should like to thank all helpers and competitors for contributing.

Actually, the Assembly field is a beautiful field for an Assembly - great views, great run-in, space for tents, very nice venue for the String course etc, etc. A few people had said they recollected the field being used for parking at previous Linn of Tummel events. It's certainly in the best position along the Foss road for planning junior courses. However, it is very lumpy, having at one time accommodated a shieling and therefore strewn with rocks just under the topsoil and grass. With a bit of rain, this makes the surface quite difficult for driving. The event was therefore a bit of a trial run for using the field for parking in the future, the hard-standing at Clunie Power Station no longer being available. For cars it would probably work, but for camper vans and motor homes I'm not so sure. A long period of dry weather before the event would help.

PLANNER'S COMMENTS: Jim Martin writes: Thanks to everyone who attended and helped out at Linn of Tummel on Sunday. In particular thanks to John (controller) and Roger (organiser) who made the day a great success. I planned the courses from white up to black and had great fun doing it.

CONTROLLER'S COMMENTS: John Emeleus (KFO) writes:

Congratulations to ESOC for staging this event. The club has an impressively large membership from which to draw support for this type of competition. Roger, as organiser, had his work cut out in trying to solve the problem of arranging parking away from the area and then getting people to it along some rather minor roads, with many possibilities investigated. From all accounts I received, his transport plan from Pitlochry worked very well. Thankfully the weather on the day was excellent but I would like to think that we could have gone ahead with snow on the ground and even with the access road impassable in its final stages. As it was, the weekend of the event was the first of my 4 visits when the area was snow free and I was pleased just to spot a slither of something hard-packed and slippery on the roadside as I drove up the hill to the assembly field on Saturday morning.

Jim worked very hard to produce the courses and was assiduous in responding to my comments and questions. He gave people on the higher technical difficulty courses experience of some quite different types of terrain, and once the initial climb had been achieved much of the ground was relatively runnable. No doubt post-event discussions will have been had about the pros and cons of using a high start for courses that didn’t need to be based on line features. I had noted that of the 4 maps I have from previous events at Linn of Tummel only one showed a high start and I was happy enough to follow the decision to start all courses near the road.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the routegadget analysis of the courses. It is always very instructive to get this picture of what happened out there. Jim and I heard that some people’s navigation fell apart once across the road and this seems to have happened to an extent. Competitors would certainly have been tired by this stage. It is interesting and pleasing to see a variety of routes taken on some of the long and short legs

I note from social media a comment about the lack of long legs on the shorter TD5 courses, specifically Blue. I apologise to anyone who felt that the middle distance style of navigation represented too great a portion of their course. I thought Jim came up with some good, longer legs, but it now seems obvious that some courses got a different balance from others, which is something I overlooked and take responsibility for not dealing with.

There were also some other things I let slip through, notably that wet pit (211) on the open hill above the start. I have previous bad form with pits but thought I’d made improvements in my approach. I considered the site a fair challenge, with surrounding features, including the adjacent marsh, and even a slightly higher border to the pit, presumably the earth from when it was dug out. The planner had placed the control marker fairly, with the top visible when nearby, but as I discovered on Sunday evening, when I visited to collect the control, it had been pressed down through use. I then leant on it and saw it sink in another foot. The older style T-bars used in Scotland since the mid-90s have a short length of metal butting outwards from the shaft, designed to stop this sinking into soft ground, not as I thought for a long time to help the planner get the thing into the ground in the first place! I have taken note.

Someone told me that 204, the shallow re-entrant in the SE part of the area, was much closer than mapped to the stream junction below. My control collection route also took me there and I can confirm this is the case, with the site only 25-30m from the junction, not 45-50m as mapped. Apologies to people who felt they were on location and could not see the control, since you had to be standing in the actual single contour re-entrant to see the control flag.

No-one told me about problems with the map at 238, in the woods a few 100m west of the finish, and unfortunately I did not realise until the day before the event that the “middle crag” with the control on was actually not in line with the other two, as the map suggests, but 5-10m further north, and also not closer to upper crag. I assume most people were just happy to find a control flag by this stage, however if you thought things a little odd in that location there is the reason.

Finally, an explanation regarding the rather easy control (242) near the stream junctions, on longer courses shortly before the road crossing. This acted as a safety feature rather than a navigational challenge, to give you a fair chance of crossing the streams during or after any heavy rain, rather than leaving you apparently stuck the wrong side of a single, raging torrent below the control site.

I would like to thank ESOC for the opportunity to control here and I hope that the area will see plenty more events on it.

A fine orienteering area comprising mostly open hillside with heather, bracken, crags, rock features and scattered birch trees with some larger areas of woodland.

FINAL DETAILS now available. Start times are on Fabian4

Details of maps available for entry on the day (EOD) are below

Image of the Mary Erskine and Ravelston Woods map

Mary Erskine School and Ravelston Woods

ESOC local event in Edinburgh and the Lothians

Sat 17th Mar 2018

Type of event: Local
Near: Edinburgh

Results are here

Winsplits are here

LOST PROPERTY: A pair of blue/white ski gloves (possibly child size) were found on the sofa in Reception. We aren't sure if they belong to an orienteer or one of the many others who were using the facilities today so they have been left at the Mary Erskine Sports Centre reception and can be collected from there.

ORGANISER'S COMMENTS: The freezing cold was the main thing to contend with for all helpers today. Very grateful indeed to all who put up with this to make the event happen. People soon get warm running about, but not sitting at a table filling in forms! We're very grateful to the staff at the Sports Centre too, who allowed us to partly move inside.

PLANNER'S COMMENTS: Thanks to everyone who came to enjoy the courses today despite the "Mini Beast from the East" making an appearance and giving us some very cold weather. I hope you have all warmed up now!
Mary Erskine is a great little area with a range of terrain, and I aimed to make the longer courses as challenging as possible by keeping the legs short. This did make the courses fairly dense in terms of controls near each other and legs crossing over, which probably made it a bit trickier sometimes to work out where you were actually supposed to go next! The west part of the wood is particularly good and all of the longer courses got into that section. The longer courses also all had the control in the middle of the tunnel, and I know not everyone loved crawling through that but thought it would be something a bit different for you!
After doing the armchair planning, I moved various controls to avoid some of the muddier and steeper parts of the wood and also some controls moved because of the difficulty of sticking them into the ground or attaching them to something. There was construction work over in the south-east which was mapped as at last weekend with the out of bounds shading etc. but had all changed again by the time we were there today, so sorry about that but I'm sure you call coped no problem.
Since the green criss-crossed such a lot, I put the light green together as another option, and this simply used controls from other courses so was an easy thing to add as another option. Not many people ran that course as it turned out!
It was brilliant to see so many recently joined ESOC members at the event, and thank you to everyone who helped with all of the different jobs.

Best for beginners and improvers and experienced orienteers looking for training

Corstorphine Hill

ESOC local event in Edinburgh and the Lothians

Sat 17th Feb 2018

Type of event: Local
Near: City of Edinburgh

The results are here.

Winsplits are here.

Organiser's Comments
The Corstorphine Hill event was well attended, and it was lovely to welcome so many newcomers and family groups as well as experienced orienteers. I hope everyone will be keen to do more orienteering, and it was very encouraging to hear so many enthusiastic comments.

Thanks to Ian and Eleanor for their great courses – and it was even a nice day!

LOST PROPERTY
Pepsi’s compass: contact me to get it back, or collect it at the event at Mary Erskine School and Ravelston Woods.

Anne Thom Organiser 07798 646423

Note this is a late change of area for the 17th February event. The event was originally scheduled to be at Dalmeny Estate but had to be changed in early January 2018, some time after the 2018 local event fliers were distributed. Corstorphine Hill is an equally good area, suitable for orienteering at all skill levels.

ESOC Sprint-O 2018 incorporating SOUL 2

Broxburn and Uphall

Sun 04th Feb 2018

Type of event: Regional, Sprint
Near: Broxburn

Results are here (legs before and after 114 have been excluded because 114 kept moving)

Results for chase leaving legs before and after 114 in place

Prologue winsplits

Chase winsplits

Routegadget for prologue

Routegadget for chase

LOST PROPERTY: 1 control description holder. If it belongs to you please email

Organiser's Comments: A huge thank you to all who came along and competed at Broxburn today. We hope you enjoyed your courses and that the missing/moving control 114 on the Chase didn't spoil your enjoyment if you were affected by this (courses 1,2 and 4). Points are not affected as only the Prologue attracted SOUL and British Orienteering ranking points.

It was a difficult decision whether to void the legs involved or allow control 114 to be 'optional' i.e. not disqualify anyone who didn't punch it. The final decision is that the relevant legs are voided for the ESOC Sprint O as this is felt to be fairest for most competitors. We decided however to publish both sets of results so that you can see the differences. Having analysed the overall results there are fewer differences than might have been expected. On the course results a small number of competitors swap a single place and on the class results only 2 competitors on the Men's Open swap a place. The differences in overall times are mostly very small which perhaps reflects the fact that most competitors were confident enough to keep going when the control wasn't where it should have been.

After some challenging weather for the first SOUL of 2018 we fervently hoped for reasonable weather and were very lucky that the forecast was pretty good for February and the weather on the day matched the forecast.

As ever, an army of ESOC volunteers worked exceptionally hard on the day to put on this 2-race event. A big thank you to all our volunteers and to Planner, Katy Lessells and Controller, Ted Finch (FVO) for all their hard work.

Margaret Dalgleish

FINAL DETAILS

START TIMES are on Fabian4.

A newly mapped area for this competition in 2018.

A 2-race competition comprising a prologue followed by a chasing start in the second race.

Cammo Estate

ESOC local event in Edinburgh and the Lothians

Sat 13th Jan 2018

Type of event: Local
Near: Edinburgh

Here are the updated results

Background to above results: The above results were updated Sunday evening (14th). 3 competitors (1 yellow, 1 orange and 1 green) will find their SI Card (dibber) number is still showing on the results rather than their name. We haven't been able to match up an entry form to these numbers/times. If you are one of these 3 people please email with details and we'll update the results.

Planners' Comments (Kerry and dad Mark)

We hope that you all enjoyed your courses at Cammo. We tried to make them as interesting as possible and from the discussions at the finish I think we achieved that for most.
For regular orienteers Cammo is well known so we had to do something different with the most difficult course hence the (very) long leg was introduced. We also tried to plan legs that offered opportunities to take shortcuts through the terrain rather than the longer path runs. The routes taken on the long leg seemed to be split fairly equally with people either taking the western route through the wood (using different paths through this complex area) or the more straightforward route to the eastern side staying in the open but having to traverse (Tower) hill. Personally we would have taken the western route as this offered easier running but the best route all comes down to your own strengths and weaknesses. We’ll be interested to look at the splits if the computing issues last Saturday allow these to be uploaded to the website.
This was Kerry’s first attempt at planning and she really enjoyed the experience. I think she’ll be back to do more planning in the future.
And finally, thank you to Janet and all the ESOC (and Interlopers!) helpers on the day without them these events would not go ahead.

Organiser's Comments
Our Cammo event in January is always very well-attended, and it's great to see so many people starting the year with some good orienteering and resolving to continue with this.   The special features of this event were (in addition to the large numbers and quick times which caused the computer hiccups) the very well-planned Green course, which provoked much discussion about route choice, and the number of people who came back to do a second course.
Junior training beforehand seems to have inspired many of those coming near the top of the Green Course results. It was great to see lots of new ESOC members, and just as good to welcome all the new families trying it out for the first time. Please do all come back for more!.

LOST PROPERTY
A dark blue/green jacket with a compass, a pair of black gloves and a Green course ticket in the pockets.
A red and black striped "North Face" hat.
A Sainsburys bag with a lunch box in it.
Contact me to get them back

NOTE  Our next event, on 17th February, is at Corstorphine Hill instead of Dalmeny as printed in the fixture leaflet. Check the ESOC website for details nearer the time.

Janet Clark    Organiser     0131 225 7771

Excellent area for newcomers and improvers and for training for experienced orienteers