Planners comments

Farnley is a new area to orienteering and despite not being the most technically challenging area it was still disappointing to have so few pre-entries, however a few more turned up on the day and the children I saw finishing on the schools courses seem to have enjoyed themselves with quite a few going out on a second course.  Unfortunately, we had a problem with our SI kit during the event which meant we were unable to give accurate results.  Thank you for your patience with this and we will be able to produce results but it will take a little longer than usual.

At the early planning stage we were given restrictions around the northern and southern areas, including the more interesting wooded parts of the map, which limited the technical difficulty that would be achievable.  At the beginning of June it came to light that a large number of fields were not allowed to be used and there was a potential issue with further out of bounds areas in the woods towards the end of the White to Light Green courses due to pheasants. This necessitated a re-plan of all the courses, the use of a second start and some negotiation by Mike Pownall regarding the pheasants to enable the event to continue.  Even so, the finish was not correctly located on the day as a strip had been ploughed on the edge of the field and exactly where the finish was supposed to be.  Hopefully people were happy with their courses despite these limitations and also despite the vegetation which has turned into a jungle in the past month.

I would like to thank Farnley Estate and Landowners for allowing the event to take place and Mike Pownall for the amount of time spent liaising and negotiating with various people at Farnley and producing the amount of map updates that were needed.

Thanks also to Neil Conway for being an extremely patient Controller despite my barrage of emails at times and incompetence at basic IT skills with Purple Pen! 

Finally, thanks to Simon Martland for helping put controls out and saving me the need to either put controls out on Friday night or start at 5am as I could not have covered all that area on my own otherwise.  Equally I would like to thank Simon and Neil as well as the whole Barraclough family (including Grandma) and friend Edward for helping to collect them back in again.

Emma Harrison