Sarum Juniors enjoy pre-Christmas training

Nine young Sarum orienteers and a cohort of helpers recently enjoyed an evening of map reading training in the Reading Room at Stratford sub Castle. The evening started off with the presentation of a cake to Charlotte Thornton on the occasion of her (censored) birthday.

Marc Balston and Liz Yeadon put together some challenging exercises to test map feature recognition, map memory and map symbol recognition. To start off, everyone was given a 1/3 segment of one of 3 O-maps. They then had to find others who matched up with their map. This mixer ended up with teams of three who competed to complete correctly a further three tests.

In the first test each team member had to look at cards bearing a small map feature, such as a rootstock, distinctive tree or gully junction, then go the other end of the room and try to identify that feature on photographs having a kite on the feature. If this could be done by memorising the feature a bonus point was scored.

In the second test a leg route was shown on a fragment of map and, again, the control at the end of the leg had to be correctly identified and circled on a full map at the other end of the room. Again, doing this by memory earned a bonus point.

Finally, map feature symbols had to be correctly identified from a written description.

All this activity helped keep the outside cold and damp at bay and was duly rewarded by cakes, including Charlotte’s scrumptious cake and hot chocolate.

Many thanks to Jo for bringing the event together, to the puzzle setters, Marc and Liz and all the other Elves and helpers.

Merry Christmas everyone.