My, the nettles! Writeup here.
Here’s my whole route – a pretty good GPS trace the whole way. Note that I made good use of paths and roads, because of all the bracken and nettles about the place.
Here’s a mistake on the approach to the first control – not a great choice of route (the red arrows show a better route that I should have taken.) Then, when I got to the fence corner, I turned left and went down the bank, whereas the control was actually straight ahead. Oops!
Here’s my biggest mistake. Thanks to the shoulder-high bracken I didn’t see the reentrant for No. 16 so overshot it. But the big one was the very short leg to No. 17. I spent ages getting stung by nettles, trying to find the control. Again, it was hidden by bracken. I was less than 50 yards from it the whole time but never saw it until I hit on the “elephant trail”.
This wasn’t a mistake – I just love the fact that with a free tool (Google Earth) I can see my exact approach to an individual tree. Post-race analysis doesn’t get much more detailed than this.
2 replies on “Race 2: Knole Park”
Having been to this event I’ve defintely added it to my “never again” areas. A nice park but with the limitations of golf course, the courses just became a series of path run – the courses were just different lengths of Red courses.
Remind me not to go to this area – just seen the map on Routegadget and it looks absolutely horrible! You’d need some imaginative planning to get anything decent-looking on that…