Kilnsey is complicated for other reasons.  We learned at JK 2016 that relying on a field for parking in March/April is not a good idea.  Emergency arrangements were needed just before that event when it was clear that a nicely sloping parking field with top access and a lower exit used for maybe a thousand cars for the Kilnsey Show in the summer would just be too wet in March/April.  Threshfield Quarry is massive and can swallow up lots of cars on hard ground.  But it means a long walk to a start and from a finish.  It was thought that this would put a lot of people off, though in the end it didn’t.  Cars for the event easily fitted into the quarry with hardly any hold ups even though much of the parking near the quarry entrance was initially taken up by Fellsman Hilke competitors returning from their event.

Kilnsey South rises to 450m.  With a north wind and rain it can be a serious concern.  Competitors were warned when the event was first advertised that a waterproof hooded top might be compulsory.  A few days before the event all competitors were informed that such tops would be compulsory.  It was very cold on the day when the start team went off to set up and early starting helpers went off at 10 o’clock.  Later starters were a bit luckier.

The area is used for farming sheep and cattle.  This gives two problems.  There are lots of walls and fences to keep the animals where they should be, and where would the animals be on the day of the event?  To a non-farmer, the latter seems simple, but farmers often don’t know where their animals will have to be, as it depends on the weather, the progress of lambing and so many other jobs that have to be done.

Yorkshire Dales walls and fences are big and they need big stiles to cross them where there are no gates.  Competitors on the longer courses were treated to a variety of ladder stiles, milk crate steps, a crawl through and a specially built step stile near the end capable of taking 700 plus competitors at a rate of 4 or 5 a minute.

The highlights of the day came as the first competitors returned smiling and giving very positive comments about their courses and the arrangements.  At the same time the weather started to improve.  And then when it improved further the ice cream van started doing business and it was warm enough for competitors to be standing around looking at results and discussing their courses.

CLARO is a small club and this was the biggest event the club had ever taken on.  Some much appreciated help came from elsewhere, but members rose to the challenge and did an excellent job on the day.  For the rest of the year the club will revert to hosting evening and family events with regionals in June and September.  This will be a relative rest before helping with the JK in 2025.

Northern Championships 2024 results. 

Kilnsey planner Vicky Bailey's perspective

Planning on Kilnsey was a challenge for all the practical reasons Mike has mentioned, but also because as planners we had two hard acts to follow in the shape of 2016’s epic acts-of-God JK and AIRE’s sunny summer special in 2018. It seemed appropriate then that our event served up something in between; on the day, a moderately grim start melting into a modestly mild finish; in the lead up, a catalogue of every other available weather, never friendly enough for shorts but nothing so hostile that it saw us off the hill. No sun, no hail strikes, but come the day: a sunburst of primroses.

With the assembly area already fixed we were limited with how much we could vary from AIRE’s event, which had used the same quarry for car parking. Early efforts to find a novel start location were quickly abandoned – you didn’t want a longer walk to the start, did you? But for the finish we gambled on a short walk back to assembly for the fun of a combined finish with the White and Yellow courses in the caravan park. This also left us with a little more length in the courses, which meant a better share of Kilnsey proper for the shortest senior courses before the inevitable march off the hill. For the longer courses, Mike and Chris’s efforts with permissions and crossing points opened up access to additional areas not used since the JK – a big help for keeping things fresh. Planning tactics evolved over the thrashing-out process. Our early strategy of avoiding long legs crossing the walls resulted in somewhat bland Middle-style courses that lacked “story”. In the end, using the walls to set up macro route choices provided better structure, and made for some entertaining post-race analysis on Routegadget. Every crossing point was worth it, Mike, honest!

The most memorable part of planning at Kilnsey has been the efforts undertaken by so many volunteers to overcome its challenges. Fathomless feats of endurance and ingenuity! An alphabetised schedule of animal-dependent crossing point logistics. A 60kg sheep-proof control marking solution! Dauntless control collectors taking on longer loops than their original courses and a map layout for every permutation of scale and paper size. The amount of time and care that goes into these events is in equal parts scary and inspiring. My tip for anyone considering taking on something similar is to get yourself a co-planner. Find one who always finds time to be slightly less busy when you are super busy; who has a seemingly exhaustible supply of patience, and a very good recipe for flapjack – then no amount of trans-Pennine weather tantrums and late-night PDF checking can get you down for long!

David Williams, the planner, identified a possible field for the arena, which we had never used previously; the field just to the south of the one we eventually used.   This allowed him to use the best of the area. He structured the courses Jan–March 2023 at the same time coordinating with Tony Thornley producing the completely revised map off new LIDAR data. By this time a year ago to allow review in competition condition the courses were more or less fully planned and controlled. Having had input during April 2023 from David Bowman assistant planner and Mark Garside (WCH) controller. Subsequently courses and map were given constant minor amendments and updates to take account of the storms, wet conditions and middle distance RWT rule changes.

The parking field has become a regular for us over the past 15 years, when we hold Regional events at Danefield.  We knew it was well drained.  It has coped admirably with the cars for all previous events.  We’ve checked it regularly throughout this very wet winter, and never had any doubts about it coping, despite having to accommodate three times the number of vehicles we have previously.  It meant quite a long walk to the arena, but we knew it was 100% reliable.

Last year by March the original assembly field was in prime condition.  This year we did a final check three weeks before the event, just before the map proofs were ready to be printed.  There was a strong chance the field would never drain sufficiently to take vehicles and 900+ pairs of feet.  This was when our brilliant hosts, Sue and Howard Cliff really came into their own.  They suggested we use the paddock and agreed to build us the bridge across the ditch leading to it.  It proved the best of arenas.  The grass didn’t cut up, and it was more compact than the original field which doubtless helped create the splendid atmosphere of the event.

The change of assembly field resulted in a few slight last-minute adjustments to the map, but did not affect the planning of the courses apart from the run-in.

We were able to pull the event off just using Aire members, which made recruitment and organising a good deal simpler than is often the case for a Major event.  From what I saw and heard on the day, all the teams did a pretty seamless job. 

At Danefield we were delighted to hear so many compliments about the courses and the organisation.  The rain held off, although a little more sunshine and a warm wind from the south would have been appreciated. I guess you can’t have everything.

We were pleased to see that both Rob and Lindsey King’s String Course and Maze were well used.

Results from the British Middle Championships 2024. 

Aire’s next large-scale events are the Sprint and Urban events in Leeds on 6–7 July 2024.

And the Dales Weekend in the Malham area on 14–15 September 2024.

LOCHOC

We started up LOCHOC in 1993 only because we thought that might make it easier to attract funding for orienteering in the Fort William area than if it was being done directly by INVOC. BASOC hadn’t yet been started at that time, so didn’t come into consideration. We had a few keen members but little or no experience. With tremendous help from Donald Petrie, the Professional Officer we put on a successful Colour Coded event - at which I was the only Club member who had ever even been to one before!

In spite of having the Six Days at Fort William in 2001 we couldn’t quite make it work and finally had to admit defeat in 2005.

MASTER MAPS AND THINGS

Of course, we had master maps and control cards and all that. The move to electronics has certainly made things a lot easier in lots of ways but we lost a bit too. Marking up your map as fast as possible in your running time was a skill on its own and if you sort of forgot which controls you had already punched you just had to have a look at your control card to check. A more serious loss was the ‘clothes line’ where the control card stubs with finishing times were hung up as runners came in. This was always a place for people to congregate and compare notes about their runs and generally socialise whereas nowadays they all tend to disappear into their cars and there’s not the same chance for a blether.

Some other changes are more striking. We went to the British Champs at Achilty in1986 before Portaloos became common: The toilet provision consisted of a very large hole in the ground surrounded by an imperfect screen of hessian sacking. It was not pleasant.

PLANNING & ORGANISING

LOCHOC was already struggling when I became a coach so I never really got to do very much.  Organising was just a chore but planning was more fun and I did a fair bit of that in LOCHOC; maybe planning the string courses was the most enjoyable. You can put the string where you might hesitate to put a yellow course and make it seem a real adventure for the young runners. It’s most important to get the junior courses right; give the experts a stupid course and they’ll only call you names but do it to the young ones and maybe they will never come back.

BEST RUN?

The Scottish Six Days is tough going because it usually attracts a lot of foreign competition as well as a lot of runners from south of the Border so I think I was most pleased about winning M85 in 2003.  Every other year I have been slower than an assortment of Swedes, Danes or Swiss and even an occasional Englishman; but in 2003 when it came to Day 6 I had enough points to be certain at least of second place so had nothing to do but run as fast as I could and not waste any time worrying about navigating or anything else and the Swedish competition helped by having a bad run. The trophy is still sitting on my hearth.

Although it makes a pleasant change to win and I always had a go, I don’t think that it ever really mattered all that much. It was a good run if you had found all the controls and could still find enough to sprint on the run-in even if it did all take a long time.

HOW MANY EVENTS AND WHERE?

Don’t know how many events I went to from time to time but have kept all the maps and there are about 350 of them collected over thirty-odd years. Leafing through the file brings back a few memories…

I never got to like urban events, preferring to be out in the forest except that latterly I preferred it to be not too rough! When you get on a bit you find you have to climb laboriously down one side of a ditch and then up the other side instead of leaping smoothly across. I reckon that most planners are pretty fit athletic people who don’t yet know about this kind of thing or they would be more sympathetic.

I went to quite a few events in England, starting with the CompassSport Cup at Cannock Chase with INVOC and then quite a few trips to the Lakes and some to Yorkshire. I went to one or two events in Australia when I was there on holiday; great running and a new experience to come in with your shoes dusty. It was all a bit different: lots of controls on termite mounds, the air scented by the eucalyptus trees and kangaroos bounding off into the bush. Nearly as good as a Scottish forest in the rain…

WHY KEEP ORIENTEERING?   

This is hard to answer. For one thing, there is too much to think about for you to notice that the legs are tired and the breath is short; also because, unlike hill running where you can usually see a great line of people who are ahead of you, you never know if you are last until you see the results. More than that though, it’s mostly just about being out in the forest.

Why stop? Partly because driving to events gets more like work but mostly because even Short Green courses get to seem quite long and there are very, very few events with a class for M90’s. It’s tough competing against youngsters who are only 80 or so.

MISTAKES

Over the years I have had all the possible problems:

• Picked up the wrong map.
• Mistook the map scale.
• Left the control on a reciprocal bearing.
• Gone the right way with the map upside down.
• Run straight past the last control when I would have won.
• Failed to secure my tracksuit bottoms properly!!

FRIENDS

Orienteers everywhere seem to be a helpful friendly lot. BASOC people certainly are and they always feel like personal friends. It would be unfair to single out any one individual.

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Thank you Adrian.  Wishing you all the very best.