Many thanks for the mainly positive comments on the courses especially as the fast running, steep hills and gorse at Burrough Hill isn't to everyone's taste.

Don Moir put a lot of time into revising the vegetation detail on the map by GPS in the months prior to the event. This was much appreciated and I thought that it was made the map good enough to use for some legs requiring fine detail navigation, and as such I did place the kites such that you had to be at the feature to see them.

The other major theme for planning at Burrough Hill is use of route choice legs dependant on your preference for climb. I tried to get more than 2 obvious choices on a few and even the long legs on Brown and Blue could be tackled without any climb at all (around the west side of the area), although I doubt that this would have been the quickest route for many. Many thanks as well to those that have uploaded routes to routegadget, this gives good feedback on how the route choice legs are working.

There were still a lot of of compromises and things that in hindsight I would have changed. I decided that it was preferable to start white on a path (rather than fence) so the location of the start was somewhat limited. This also made it difficult to get a 2 decision point leg on yellow (In the end, I think that there were 2 legs on yellow that could have been made a bit more difficult, but still a few others such as the leg away from the white course which would be potentially confusing.)

I think it is also necessary to use the southern field for the longer courses, if only to save too many laps of the hill fort later on. I left an obvious dog leg in the course here. It could easily have been smoothed out a little, but certainly not removed completely, and with several other changes to incorporate just before printing, I decided to leave it as it was.

I also tried to minimise the restrictions on route choice from fences and hedges and avoid the grottier pieces of woodland. I think that worked reasonably well, but it sounds as if a few found the covered fence crossing difficult to find, and it was also a shame that I hadn't spotted the inaccuracies in the hedge mapping for map corrections. Had I done so, some better and fairer route choice legs would have been possible.

I would like to thank Bob Haskins for his patience and useful advice when the draft courses eventually arrived and to Simon for turning around the printing late on after I had cut, recut and finally checked all the circles and lines.

Thanks also to Roger for his organisation and keeping me updated about the archaeological dig. Last but not least many thanks to Steve Edgar, Nigel Lydon , Bob Haskins and Ian Wells for helping with the control collecting. With the last finisher soon after 1.30, we were able to clear controls, tapes and fence crossings and check the equipment before 2.30 and avoid the rain.

Mark Foxwell.

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Burrough Hill is a compact site with the opportunity to give competitors a lot of climbing. The shape of the area, and fence layout, tend to put limits on course planning and Mark gave choices which could limit the climb, but probably at the expense of distance. Most of the site is quite runnable and hopefully the worst of the overgrown parts were avoided. The map has been recently updated by Don Moir and the thickets and gorse were accurately mapped to enable these features to be used as control sites with confidence.

The most common comment from finishers was that they thought there was more climb than indicated on the map. I think that it was the steepness of the area that made it seem this way and perhaps some climbed more than they needed to. I’d like to thank Mark for his hard work in planning the courses and making the longer courses interesting and not making you dizzy in getting the required distances. We took the climb into account when finalising the course distances and the times seem to reflect that this was about right.

I’d also like to thank Roger Phillips for his work as Organiser on the day, and to the competitors for finishing in good time to enable us to clear up before the rain. I think this is possibly the first event I have ever seen where the provisional results were posted onto our club website before the official closing time of the courses.

Bob Haskins

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