Going international Back in the summer of 2023, I was chatting to my friend Lucia about mapping, and she mentioned that her clubmate in Snättringe SK, Joel, did a lot of mapping and I should talk to him. So, I got in touch and it turned out he was getting more requests
Polmaise After so long working on sprint maps, I was very much looking forward to getting my teeth into a big forest project in August. Polmaise is a truly unique area close to Stirling which FVO frequently use. Having run there once or twice previously I knew it would be tricky
Sprint Scotland 2024 (and the Collydean map) Hello everyone! I'm catching up on articles for my website and so this is a throwback to May and Sprint Scotland. I have written my WOC write-ups (about 20,000 words in total!) but I'm not allowed to publish them until at least the IOF report
5 days to WOC I've been very quiet on here for a while because for the last 2 months I've been full time on WOC. It is exciting and nerve wracking in equal measures. At the start of May I organised Sprint Scotland (and made one of the maps), and
Scottish Spring - Kintyre Planning courses for a Scottish O League in a great technical forest, and a little bit about organising the thing too...
Bughtlin and Dalkeith It's hard to believe I made my first urban map 12 months ago - Corporation Park, which coincidentally PFO are finally using for an event in two weeks' time. Since then I think the count is ten, plus a few more half-finished ones. Five of those have
Hardcastle Crags The upper Calder Valley and its off-shoots are all very steep, very narrow and mostly wooded. And, usually, heavily populated and industrialised. Between the valleys are wide, flat moors, a mixture of tussocks and heather. The majority of the orienteering happens on the moors, for example at Castle Carr, used
Maps Poltonhall for AROS sprint relay - start to finish What do you need to go orienteering? 1. A good area I was sitting at a EUOC pasta night when my friend Jim and I got onto the topic of whether there were any decent sprint O areas in the Edinburgh area that hadn't yet been mapped. So,
Falkirk (and a note on auto-generation) Right at the start of thinking about Sprint Scotland, GG (who is a WOC mapper) asked me if I'd like to make one of the maps, and he'd do the other one. I said yes, but I was a little nervous that this would be by
Sprint Scotland 2023 Organising a World Ranking Event and GB team selection races for the European Champs. Sprint Scotland is the flagship event of Masterplan Adventure; it's really the event that got the club going in 2016. It felt like a big responsibility to take on the job of organising it
Lews Castle Hope today was a fun end to the week, despite the unfortunate issue with the olive green. Here's the story of the mapping and planning, which were both a joint effort between me and Chris. So back in May, Chris and I had finished all the Tarbert stages,
Events Planning courses - Torsacleit Hope you enjoyed today despite the inclement weather. Here's the story of Torsacleit from my perspective: I heard one or two people say it felt like the Lakes today, and indeed, it was a Martin Bagness map (which I thought was excellent). When he sent it to Chris
Maps A unique sprint - Tarbert When we were scouting out Harris for Coast & Islands, we discovered that immediately adjacent to Tarbert was a cracking area of rock and contour detail, and so came the idea to have a combined terrain/urban sprint. I had two jobs for this stage - mapping the urban section,
Maps Cnoc Na Cloiche So, did anyone notice the difference between the two halves of today's map? Here's the story of an unlikely collaboration between me and Steve Smirthwaite. When Chris first asked me if I wanted to help make the maps for Coast & Islands, the first thing I
News IOF Young Leaders Academy Last week I had the privilege of joining the IOF's inaugural Young Leaders Academy, alongside the Italy 5 Days in the Dolomites. The idea was to bring together keen young orienteers from all over the world for a week of learning about all the things that surround and
News Exciting stuff in the works ...and a big thank you to the Orienteering Foundation! In one month's time I'll be in the Italian Dolomites for the IOF Young Leaders Academy, which I'm really looking forward to. It should be a great opportunity to work with other young people on
Maps Bold Venture and Whitehall Parks Another two parks for Pendle Forest Orienteers, supporting their efforts with the Find Your Way project and following on from Corporation Park which I mapped in January. Bold Venture and Whitehall are both Victorian style parks in Darwen, near Blackburn. They're separated by about a mile and have
School Maps Shakespeare Primary School Josh Jenner runs a business called The Outdoor Classroom, which aims to get children learning in the outdoors through orienteering. The idea is to make it possible to bring a maths or science lesson, for example, outdoors. The children run an orienteering course, but at each control they can do
Maps Making a World Champs training map - Leith Docks In July 2024, the World Orienteering Championships are coming to Edinburgh, which is not only incredibly exciting, but represents a massive opportunity to promote and develop orienteering in the UK, particularly Scotland. So, when my friends at Edinburgh University Orienteering Club asked if I could make a map for them,
Events Lakes Spring After the successful Lakeland Warrior weekend, Martin Bagness and I noticed that South Ribble Orienteering Club had a national event scheduled for Sunday 5th March, on Whitbarrow, a top-quality area which is rarely used. Given this would be a month before the JK, we thought that we could organise a
Maps Todmorden Instinctively, updating a map feels like it should be an easier and smaller job than creating a new map, but that's often not quite how it turns out. I've heard good mappers say that if they're asked to update a map, they will actually
Maps Corporation Park The Find Your Way project is an initiative to get more disadvantaged and hard-to-reach communities involved with orienteering. Pendle Forest Orienteers are actively engaging with it and are keen to get new maps made to support the project, particularly in places where there traditionally are not so many orienteers. The
School Maps North Halifax Grammar School This was the very first map I made. It's the Sixth Form I went to, North Halifax Grammar School, and the PE teachers were thrilled that they had an accurate map to use for orienteering lessons in PE. However, an orienteering map can be used for so much
Events Christmas Cup This was my big job of the last couple months of 2022; a 4-day event from 29th Dec to 1st Jan, working with Masterplan Adventure. We'd lined up three really good quality forest areas for the first three days, all around Perthshire and Stirlingshire, then we had Graeme
Events Organising a World Ranking Event - Lakeland Warrior In Autumn 2020, as orienteering events began to return after the first lockdown, ex-international orienteers and all-round orienteering legends Martin Bagness and Carol McNeil organised a low-key weekend of racing, aimed primarily at elites. Numbers were kept low, organisation minimal, but the quality of maps and courses was high, which
