Moravian Orienteers

Try out the updated permanent orienteering courses at Quarry Wood, Elgin.  Choose from Yellow, Orange or Light Green courses. Or maybe use the all controls map to design your own training run! Visit our Permanent Orienteering page for more information. Courses start and finish at Leggat Car Park, at the western end of Quarry Wood. Thanks to Forestry and Land Scotland for their support for this initiative.

News from The JK Easter Event 
There was plenty of excitement (and mud!) generated over the four day event by the 15 Moravians who travelled down to the Midlands. 
You can see all the results from this page.

Here is a summary from Eddie

15 Moravians made the long treck to the English Midlands for the JK Trophy, considered Britain’s foremost annual event. We returned with great results far above our size. Indeed the Scots in general came away with a huge tally of medals despite the terrain being totally alien to anything we have here.

The sprint event was a very interesting University at Loughborough. Not overly difficult, but consistently requiring concentration, a bit like Sin City in Lossiemouth. It was far too much for my brain.

Our Chairman Andrew however had a stormer. After a massive collision knee to knee collision with an elite guy coming round a bend the other way, he picked himself up and won the bronze, just 8 seconds off gold – he would clearly have won without the collision.. By prizegiving time he was unable to walk.

Isobel won the first of her 3 silvers of the weekend in W20E

Day 2 was a middle race and day 3 a long one, with the 2 days adding together for the overall trophy.

Andrew Campbell, our Chairman, writes….

I am delighted to report that the Scottish Orienteering Association has awarded the Club its Silver award. This is great news! It reflects a real team effort from club members involved in submitting its bid to the SOA. The accreditation involved a detailed review of the club's activities, governance and profile. Moravian is the fourth club in Scotland to achieve Silver accreditation, after ESOC, BASOC and FVO. The key elements of the SOA accreditation scheme are summarised below.
''The scheme is run by the Scottish Orienteering Development Officers, who meet with and support clubs at all levels through the process. The scheme is independently assessed and clubs can apply for Bronze accreditation, followed by Silver and then Gold. This will help clubs achieve an accreditation award, which many grant and funding sources now require. The key aims of the scheme are to support and empower orienteering clubs to:
- Create an environment which is inclusive, safe and child friendly, based on good practice and the best it can be for participants, coaches, officials and volunteers.
- Develop high standards of club governance.
- Encourage lifelong participation in our sport through sustainable club development and pathways.''

This six event series, run jointly by MOR, INVOC and BASOC, is now completed.  We encountered some wintry weather conditions over the last three months, and had to delay our Burgie Event twice!   Thanks to Angus Laird (INVOC) for updating the league results -  we can now announce the class winners.  The Long course was won by Finlay McLuckie (M16), ahead of Rory Black (INVOC) and Angus Laird (INVOC). Kate McLuckie (W16) was 6th, and 1st female.  The short course was won by Henrik Borrowman (INVOC) with Eddie Harwood (M70) and Morag McLuckie (W55) tied for 4th place, Morag being 1st female.  Just one point behind in 6th was Rob Parkinson (M65). Congratulations to all who took part, and thanks to the planners and organisers of these popular events.  

A huge thanks to Andrew and Liz Campbell who co-ordinated the annual club awards evening at Roseisle on Saturday evening. It was a really successful event, at which we not only celebrated individual successes during the past 12 months, but were able to hear about the early days of the club following its formation in January 1974.

The evening started with Andrew, assisted by Michael Bishenden, presenting awards for orienteering successes and contributions to the activities of the club over the last year - see photo of award winners opposite. Neil Mclean (now an M80) then entertained us with his recollections of the formation and early days of the club back in the 70s. Neil proudly showed us his original Moravian O top - a collector's item! He and David Ritchie shared some of the early maps (a few in black & white, and even had results from those early events. One set of results include David as a youthful M21 near the top of the A course! We then all enjoyed a shared meal - what a great spread of tasty food. Several with healthy appetites were able to go back for seconds!

Congratulations to four of our Juniors: Michael Bishenden, Sophie Howard, Kate McLuckie and Finlay McLuckie, who have been selected for the British Orienteering Talent Squad Scotland for the forthcoming  2023/24 season. The talent squads aim to develop 15-18 year olds beyond the Regional Squad level by providing a programme of training, education and coaching which takes a holistic view of their development as athletes, orienteers and individuals. It encourages the athletes to take responsibility for their own plans to improve their orienteering and hopefully acts as a source of motivation and enjoyment for them. The British Orienteering Performance Director, Bernie Dietzig said:‘I would like to congratulate the athletes on their selection to the British Orienteering talent squads. We are again excited to offer a comprehensive program for the athletes this season. The talent program will deliver a number of workshops and camps, which will help our young athletes to fulfil their potential and prepare to compete on the international stage’

Our Darnaway event day dawned warm and sunny and there was a good turnout, despite all our junior stars being away for the weekend. A big thank you from Morag (organiser) to everyone for helping to ensure the event was another Moravian success.

I really appreciated so many offers of help and the time that you all gave either before or after your run (or both in some cases!) Thanks too to those of you who came along, even though you weren’t participating in the event today.  Every single one of you helped to ensure that the event ran smoothly.

A particular thank you to Ewart Scott who stepped in as Controller at fairly short notice and has spent many hours in the forest in the run up to today’s event.

Controllers Comments:

Thanks to Moravian for asking me to control their regional event at Darnaway. My last time in Darnaway was in 2015 during the S6D, some of the area seemed more runnable then.

Peter did a great job with the courses, given the fact there is a line feature within a relatively short distance from every control. Unavoidable for this area. It’s not easy planning highly technical courses in such areas.

Congratulations to Kathryn Barr (W21) and Isobel Howard (W20) who have been selected to represent Scotland at the Senior Home Internationals to be held in South Wales on the weekend of 9th/10th September.  The individual event will be held on Merthyr Common, and the relays the following day on Clydach Terrace. Kathryn heads off to Canada later in September to take up a position in a Vets practice in Calgary.  Good luck Kathryn, and good luck both in South Wales! 

All club members are invited to our Annual General Meeting, to be held at  The Club Room, Altyre on Saturday 19th August at 1.00 pm or as soon as possible after the Retro O event.  The agenda for the meeting can be found here.  We would be pleased to receive nominations from members to stand for committee positions - in particular, we currently do not have a Secretary or a Fixtures officer.  We look forward to seeing you there.
Rob Parkinson, Acting secretary

A4 Design & Print Northern Urban League

Many thanks to everyone for supporting our first Northern Urban League Series. Special thanks go to our sponsor, A4 Design & Print, all the organisers and planners, Michael Bishenden for crunching the results, and to our winners of the long and short courses.

After combining the best three results from the four races, INVOC secured the top three spots on each course. Well done to Rory, Laurence, Wullie, Douglas, Iona and Hazel.  The final results table covering all four races is (below/attached):

Andrew and Colin - Series Organisers