Yesterday was one of those very rare days when we got to run on a new map of an area, within our geographical catchment area, which has never been used for orienteering before. And what a pleasure it was, on an unexpectedly sunny and warm autumnal day.
Usually events these days are on well known area (Moors Valley) or an old area under a new name. Mount Ararat appeared a couple of years ago, but turned out to be part of Ringwood North in disguise.
When John Warren first got permission to map the area from The Somerley Estate and Lord Normanton, it looked as if we had got quite a large new area, big enough for a Galoppen. Later, as the mapping progressed, it became clear that most of the wooded area flattered to deceive. Whilst looking OK from the road edges, apart from a nice bit of runnable woodland which was out of bounds to orienteering because it is used by paintballers, most of the forest was so densely infested with rhododendron as to be virtually useless for orienteering, and most of the open areas were taken up by the golf course or being excavated for gravel extraction.
However, when we also got permission to use the open parkland between the big house and the river, we had enough of an area at the northern end of the estate to take smaller local events and yesterday’s event was the first time most people had seen it. It proved very attractive – ideal for the juniors but very fast and with enough detail to ensure that a loss of concentration meant time was lost. It looks an ideal relay area (possibly for the Furrow Hoppers but I could see it being usable for a conventional relay race) or for Park-O/Sprint-O.
The map still needs a bit of tweaking. Few new maps are right first time, and we’ve got one or two areas, hurriedly mapped last month once we found we were able to use them after all, which can be improved upon now that the bracken is dying down and we can see a bit more detail.
Meanwhile, what of the large green area of fight to the south of the area we used yesterday. Well, it has a good and well defined track network and it has occurred to the club that, if we added it to existing maps of the Ringwood forests, we would have an area which would be a superb venue for a Mountain Bike orienteering event. MTBO events are quite popular in the North of England, but there are very few events in the south and WIM has a number of dedicated cyclists amongst its members: watch this space.
