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Next Thursday the venue for stage 4 of the Birmingham Parks O-Ringen is Pype Hayes, whose main claim to fame these days is that the park hosts Birmingham’s November-5th bonfire every year. The orienteering map on the COBOC website was drawn in 1988, and the park is almost unrecognisable! Well, there’s still the hall, the pond and the car park…
A clue to what’s gone on can be found on the council’s website, where it says “The park is also the site of the ward’s millennium woodland.” Suffice to say, there are a lot more trees in the park today than there were in 1988. Also, they’ve recently been spending Lottery money building new footpaths to create a link between Castle Vale and Sutton.
The event on the old map will be a good excuse to practise your compass work… 
Update: To give you a sporting chance, we’ve decided to use the 2004 map. We’re too kind…
Finally another one! Inspired by the bundle of maps donated to me by Roger Keeling. Thanks, Roger! As before, all the maps are from West Midlands areas.
Update: approximate distances by road from the centre of Birmingham:
1. 50 km, 2. 65 km, 3. 35 km, 4. 25 km, 5. 90 km, 6. 60 km, 7. 45 km, 8. 80 km, 9. 95 km, 10. 95 km, 11. 10 km, 12. 45 km.
Speaking about today’s Euromeeting event in Finland, Martin Ward writes:
Interesting to see how the mass-start format has been planned. For the women there are two different 2.2km loops (about 16 mins for the leaders), with one common control so each loop has two gaffles, making four combinations in total. Then it’s a much bigger loop common to all.
Same concept for the men, but it’s three gaffled loops making about 8km total, then a big common loop.
Now why does that sound familiar to me? Well, the gaffled loops are like the ones I included at the event at Aston Hall last week. The medium course had two common controls, giving four combinations, and the long course had three common controls, giving eight combinations. It’s probably a good idea to call this method of separating runners on a mass-start event “Farsta”, like the example I found on the web.
The way my courses crisscross the park it’s hard to see the Farsta pattern, but notice that the common controls are 127 and 128 on the Medium and 107, 118 and 127 on the Long. You can see the loops on the Euromeeting courses (“TUE 5.7. mass-start”) here.
Remember this? Well, another example has just jumped out at me…
Look what came in the post today
(I couldn’t go to the events because of my poorly ankle.)
Ales Hejna posted about this on Facebook: there’s loads of blogposts about how this Swiss mapper, Thomas Scholl, is being expelled from the Swiss Orienteering Association. It appears from reading this newspaper article that this has a lot to do with his intransigence in restricting a particular orienteering club’s use of maps of their area. But the result of the Association’s decision is that another club will have no access to the maps of their area.
If there’s a lesson to be learnt here, it might be that we should never take our mappers for granted.
Tomorrow the British Championships are being held on Cannock Chase, and for the new issue of the West Midlander Peter Guillaume has kindly dug out some items from the last time they were held there, in 1977. There isn’t room for the M43 course map, so I’m posting it here:
Update: although that’s the BOC 1977 map, it appears that that isn’t a BOC 1977 course! The map must’ve been reused a year or two later.
On Wednesday I went down to the Ordnance Survey in Southampton for the first national conference organised by the people who bring you the wonderful Geograph website. There was a good mix of talks and discussions, and for a map geek like me it was great to finally have the opportunity to visit my mecca.
Just happened to put side by side the new and old maps of Donisthorpe Woodland Park and something odd jumped out at me…
People seemed to enjoy the last one, so here’s another… All the extracts are from maps in the West Midlands Region.
Clue: distances from central Birmingham (miles): 50, 30, 5, 20, 20, 50, 25, 10, 30, 10. If you recognise any, put your answers in the “comments”.
Answers: Weston Heath, Lizard Hill, Sandwell Valley, Arley Wood, Arley Wood, Brampton Bryan, Tackeroo, Clent Hills, Coombe Abbey, Bumble Hole
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