East Midlands Champs - Stapleford Woods 5.3.06

[johnloguk]

Results now posted on the LOG website, with links to lots of photos out in the woods and also of the trophy presentations. Can you spot yourself? It was a glorious day for orienteering, without the snow and contours of South Wales but hopefully enough challenges to test people in the Spring sunshine.

http://www.logonline.org.uk/Results/Reg ... INDEX2.HTM

[Jenny E]

yup thanx LOG for a great event. the area was suprisingly runnable and well done on your first regional event

[guest]

ditto, really enjoyed the event. Well done LOG!

[Red Adder]

Photo's were interesting - trying to work out the features from a flat 2 day image is fun. Is the 1st one of left on the recond row of the first set the world's smallest mapped thicket ?

Looking at the results its a shame to see only 9 M21s - this does not, if indicative, bode too well for the sport.

I believe Stapleford has an interesting history of "ownership" - I remember helping with the field survey for Nottingham Uni club in about 1976/7(was it the first map ?) - and since then I believe NOC has also run events there.

[johnloguk]

Red Adder wrote:

Photo's were interesting - trying to work out the features from a flat 2 day image is fun. Is the 1st one of left on the second row of the first set the world's smallest mapped thicket?

Ha-ha , if I've got the right photo it was actually a gully/vegetation boundary crossing, but I can see what you mean. We did have the world's shallowest re-entrant though, and a couple of knolls measured at 0.5 metres high, but as we say in LOG "if it breaks the horizontal map the bugger"!

On a more serious note, the photos showing some rather spikey stumpbanks in rough open areas with scattered trees are fairly unique to Stapleford. These areas were originally blocks of solid rhododendron fight, then 2 years ago the rhodos were cleared leaving scattered silver birch and a few other odd trees. They then scraped up the detritus, and quite a bit of soil, into an irregular network of stumpbanks to expose the mineral soil beneath. This is to encourage natural heathland vegetation such as grasses and heathers to re-establish itself. A few natural marshes are starting to develop as you can see in some of the pics, and the race is now on between the heathland vegetation that we all want, and the nasty rhodos and brambles that are sneaking back in. There is a fair amount of young tree growth too, so as long as the rhodos and brambles lose the race we will have some nice technical areas in our flat as a pancake forest.

The old map that you remember was indeed the first one, and very green it was too. Stapleford used to be a NOC area, but they generously gave it to LOG when we started up 15 or so years ago.

[Red Adder]

NOR came up with an entry for smallest thicket at Cockley Cley on Saturday - a spindly 5 foot high holly sapling with about half-a-dozen side branches, though one did appear to have been bent down and "struck" in an attempt to increase the size of the plant for future events. The mapper was wonderfully consistent and appeared to have mapped each sapling - there mustt have been well over a hundred on the map - true labour of love. I think I might have done a bit of judicious pruning instead.