Thanks to everyone who came along to our Sprint event at Tweedbank. It’s not often that we can offer a event which was so convenient for public transport. We strongly believe in supporting local businesses so our prizes were all sourced locally – Tempest Brewery in Tweedbank and Simply Delicious (Tablet) in Melrose.

Although we now have mapped many urban areas all across the Borders, Tweedbank was our very first urban area (in 1989) and I do hope you can now see why.

Come and join us in May if you can for our series of 4 Wednesday evening sprint events in a range of woodland and parkland settings.

Andrew Armstrong, Organiser

~~~~~~~~~~

I managed to get the winning times fairly close to the 12-15 minute guideline for all courses so I was happy with that.

The Championship courses were deliberately fairly straightforward in the first half, tempting runners into running too hard or getting complacent, but you still had to stay in control and leave enough in the tank for the hill and some tricky navigation in the second half. The SOUL courses tried not to be a re-run of the first race so everyone had different controls for this, and most courses visited new areas of the map which I used to inject some long legs with at least 2 route choices.

I’ve dug out the 1989 version of the map, a handrawn 1:5000 affair with the only housing being north of the pond. The houses at the south-west corner were under construction but there were only fields between the pond and the industrial estate. No railway station of course ! It’s been an ongoing mapping project for various club members for the past 36 years and it’s still ongoing with the industrial estate constantly changing but it remains one of our prime areas.

A few thanks: Tweedbank Primary School, the Animal & Plant Health Agency (next to the Finish), various residents and businesses that let me put controls on their property, John Tullie for pre-running some provisional courses and finding routes I hadn’t anticipated, Paul McGreal RR for manning the computers which allowed me to plan for a change, Allie Wilson Craw for Controlling, and all the RRs who helped on the day.

Lindsey Knox, Planner

Results:

	Scottish Sprints Champs 2025	SOUL 3
Results	Scottish Sprint Champs 2025 results	SOUL3 2025
Routegadget	Sprint Champs Routegadget	SOUL3 Routegadget
Winsplits	Scottish Sprint Championships 2025	SOUL3
BOF results	Sprints BOF results	SOUL BOF results
SOUL standings		SOUL points
Photos	photos
List of Scottish Champions	champions list

Full results are now HERE. Apologies they weren’t on the address shown on some of your splits – fall-out from the website problems I had mid-week.

Planner/Organiser’s Report

This was my first time planning at Bowmont, so it was quite enjoyable getting to experience a forest in more detail than you normally do just running round.

Storm Eowyn rather interrupted the planning and organising process for Bowmont and caused the delay and change of date. It also meant that I had to revise many of my original planning ideas. I hope that you found the resulting courses both challenging and interesting.

The Light Green was my attempt to join up the most technically challenging bits of Bowmont with some decent route choice alternatives but without making it too rough going underfoot. I was very impressed by the speed of the front runners! The Red was planned as a runners course, more on tracks but still with some interesting route choice and visiting some nice bits of the forest. Yellow and Orange are aimed to be stepping stones for beginners – on reflection Yellow was perhaps slightly too difficult, perhaps exacerbated by paths blocked by fallen trees!

Unfortunately the weather wasn’t quite as nice as the day before when I was putting controls out but it was still pretty good for the time of year – and Bowmont was as dry underfoot as I have seen it at this time of year.

I hope you all enjoyed yourself.

Thanks to everyone who helped on the day but particularly Lindsey who gave up her run to organise registration and download.

John Tullie

Full results are now HERE

Roxburgh Reivers again decided to use this year’s winter Eildon Hills and surrounding woodlands “Come and Try Orienteering” event as a small fundraiser for a local cause. Last year’s winter Eildon event raised money for the Harris Trust. This year we decided to raise funds for the Melrose based Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue Team who are there 24/7 as emergency backup support for so many outside activities.

Our fundraising efforts were very kindly and generously supported by regular orienteers Les and Margaret Dalgleish, who are members of ESOC (Edinburgh South Orienteering Club) and their close family members who donated the fantastic sum of £150 to mark their Golden Wedding anniversary which was the previous day. Les and Margaret attend most Roxburgh Reivers events and RR congratulate them on their anniversary and thank them for their family’s generosity to our fundraiser.

Come and Try Orienteering events are low key but we still had a great entry of 54 individual participants, many trying orienteering for the first time. The weather was a bit damp and ground conditions were often very muddy but everyone seemed to enjoy the experience. The future of all sports clubs depends very much on younger people and new families getting involved and it was nice to see so many youngsters at the start – we had sixteen enthusiastic youngsters under the age of 12 years.

The Eildons in February is about as tough as it gets so well done to all who took part! Future events and locations should be much more pleasant so hope you can all come again. If anyone would like to join the club’s emailing list, for news of future events etc, then please email us at rrenquiries@roxburghreivers.org.uk

Overall the event raised £372.83 which will be sent to Tweed Valley Mountain Rescue Team in the next couple of days.

As always these events are only possible with a lot of help from club members before, during and after the event: Lindsey Knox who does a lot behind the scenes in all events with entries and admin; Robin Sloan for updating the map, Sam McKinnon who helped put controls out the afternoon before and early morning and helped collect them afterwards, John Tullie and Ian Maxwell for also helping collect controls in.

Many thanks to Andy Beverley, Countryside Ranger at Buccleuch Estates for helping with permissions.

Thanks everyone for supporting our event.

James, Planner / Organiser

The basic results are HERE

The adjusted handicap results are below. Well done to Max for an excellent run in the dark, beating the handicapper.

Position			Target score	Actual score	%
1	Max Arthur	M60	160	183	114.38
2	John Tullie	M65	220	210	95.45
3	Robin Sloan	M75	200	180	90.00
4	Lindsey Knox	W65	200	170	85.00
5	Quin Arthur	M21	210	152	72.38
6	Keith Murray	M60	210	130	61.90
7	Fiona Johnston	W65	150	90	60.00
8	Bridget Khursheed	W60	150	90	60.00
9	Robert Cranston	M60	200	100	50.00
10	Judith Purves	W50	150	70	46.67
11	Ian Maxwell	M65	230	91	39.57
12	James Purves	M65	190	25	13.16

Results of the club championships:

Position	Name	Category	Score	Target	RaceTime	Time penalty	Net time
1	Quin Arthur	M21	90	90	00:33:40		00:33:40
2	Barry Veitch	M50	130	130	00:34:37		00:34:37
3	Fiona Johnston	W65	70	70	00:36:25		00:36:25
4	Colin Williams	M50	150	150	00:38:53		00:38:53
5	John Tullie	M65	150	150	00:39:32		00:39:32
6	Judith Purves	W50	70	70	00:39:33		00:39:33
7	Bridget Khursheed	W60	70	70	00:40:14		00:40:14
8	Robert Cranston	M60	110	110	00:46:48		00:46:48
9	Max Arthur	M60	80	80	00:50:42		00:50:42
10	Robin Sloan	M75	110	110	00:51:45		00:51:45
11	Lindsey Knox	W65	100	110	00:50:40	05:00	00:55:40
12	James Purves	M65	90	110	00:59:37	10:00	01:09:37
13	Andrew Jackson	M55	60	80	01:12:56	10:00	01:22:56

Full results are HERE

Thanks to Ian and Eileen for organising, and well done to Quin on his championship win.

Full results including splits are HERE

It was very encouraging to see such a good turn out for the only urban event in our Autumn series.  The work done by Lindsey Knox, Robin Sloan and Rob Cranston in particular to recruit some entrants from the Kelso parkrun bore fruit with a number of entrants on the Long/Light Green course. And from the conversations that I had, they appeared to enjoy this new challenge. I do hope they will return for more!

Having planned the big Kelso Urban event last year, I thought that a fresh start and finish would provide something a bit different for most competitors this time. My focus for the Light Green course was on providing as much route choice as possible for most of the legs. I therefore made use of the Roxburgh Street/Bowmont Street corridor in both directions which offered numerous lanes, closes and backyards and one sneaky wall corner which found quite a number on the wrong side of it. Those who chose the wrong side lost 2-3 minutes on leg 7-8.  I was particularly pleased to discover that there were at least 5 different routes used by competitors on the long leg 5-6. The longer routes provided more straightforward running but smart navigation could cut the length down to some extent.

Thanks to everyone for the kind words about the courses that I received at the finish. And thanks to one competitor for finding a narrow cut-through route within the town centre which has been hitherto unmapped.  That will be corrected very soon.

Andrew (Organiser/Planner)