Monday evening saw a new, very enjoyable and hopefully soon to be repeated, venture for Border Liners – an informal urban night event. The event was planned and organised by Alan Hartley, who also made the original suggestion, tested out the suitable pubs and created the map. Many thanks to him for all the work he put in.
One aim was to find a simpler way to put on such events so rather than putting out control kites and SI boxes, MapRun (a smart phone app) was used for punching and timing. It worked well, with even those who had not previously tried MapRun happy to use it thanks to good instructions from Alan.
The other simplification involved the map. Urban mapping is notoriously time-consuming, so instead Alan used OpenOrienteeringMap – free software that turns the widely used OpenStreetMap into a map that looks (mostly) like a regular Urban-O map. Not all the alleyways and footpaths were shown, so some fieldwork and use of Google Street View and aerial photos were still needed but compared with creating an Urban O-map from scratch the time saving was huge, and the result entirely satisfactory for an event of this nature.
About 15 people took part and had a choice of three different course lengths – 6km, 4km, and 3km. Good planning meant that what initially looked a fairly straightforward area provided plenty of route choice and required careful navigation; failing to find the way out of the cemetery was a problem for quite few. Appleby proved to have more hills than expected and the Christmas lights were another surprise.
You can look at the map and course here. Because it was an informal event there are no published results.
The event was based at the Royal Oak pub, and most people took the chance to have a drink or a meal after their run and enjoy some orienteering chat.
Border Liners Orienteering Club 