You might also like to find out about our permanent orienteering courses. These are in local parks and you can get a map and a course and try them at your own leisure at any time.

If you would like to join Mole Valley contact our Membership Secretary.

A note from the planner
The best bit of this event was putting out the extra controls for the score course by brilliant moonlight on Friday evening. By the time I got up in the morning to place the novice courses controls along the paths, there was thick cloud cover which persisted all day. At least it didn't rain!

The main purpose of this event was to introduce newcomers to our sport, and I think the two simple courses did this successfully. It was really good to see some smiley happy faces arriving back at the finish. I hope to see them again in the future.

To entertain the few regular orienteers who might turn up, I added three harder controls to add to the eighteen on the novice courses to make a score course. I wanted a time limit that would encourage everybody to visit at least one of the harder controls, while leaving doubt in the mind of everybody as to whether they could visit all the controls in time. This could not be done with a single time limit for everybody, hence my decision to make life a nightmare for the results processor by having a variable limit. I should apologise for not making my intended calculation sufficiently clear, with the consequence that everyone had 15 minutes more than I had planned.

The other glitch was that, despite all the control sites having been approved by the National Trust, one of their staff decided to move one of the controls during the competition. I have nothing polite to say about this, so I think I'd better keep quiet. Fortunately, the novice courses were not affected, and all the experienced orienteers seem to have taken it in their stride. Let's hope we never get a repeat during a serious competition.

My thanks to all helpers, without whom this event would not have been possible,

Ian Ditchfield, Mole Valley