Veteran Home International 22 September 2019
Binning Wood and Pentland Hills

We all arrived in Scotland on a lovely late September evening and with the promise of a sunny day, set off on Saturday morning in good spirits for the relay venue at Binning Wood near the North Berwick coast.

An area new to virtually all the team, the map showed numerous paths and several large circular areas of clearing, apparently based on a street plan of Paris. The plethora of linear features made it unlikely to be too technical but of course getting on the wrong path where two lines go in virtually the same direction can be disastrous.

England delivered a near perfect relay race with the teams coming in 1, 2 and 3 on the WMW side of the competition and 1, 2, and 4 on the MWM. Our 4th finishing teams were also well up. This fantastic result meant we won by a good margin of 40 points and once again had the beautiful pewter Qaiche trophy in our grasp.

Congratulations to all but in particular both winning teams: Jackie Hallett, Andy Simpson and Helen Winskill on WMW and John Embrey, Lesley Ross and Duncan Archer on MWM.

We finished off a successful day with various parties going swimming, paddling, indoor climbing and having ice cream and a snooze on the sands.

For the individual day, there was a slight heart in mouth feeling as we looked at the dense cloud hanging over the Pentland Hills, but the sun made a brave attempt to burn this off and by the
time the competition started it was clear. The general view was that the courses were well planned to take advantage of the area used. Once again England as a team performed very strongly with 7 class wins, 9 second places and 4 third places. We had maximum points in 5 classes and drew in one class so we finished with a very comfortable win and were presented with lovely crystal Rose Bowl.

I’m delighted that the whole team contributed strong runs in either the relay or the individual competition and in many case both. We have retained the Micklegate Bar for the overall competition.
Overall points: England 283, Scotland 226 Wales 119 Ireland 103

A break down of all the competition points is below.

Our thanks go to Margaret Dalgleish, overall organiser, and all the other event organisers, planners, controllers and helpers for putting on the events and welcoming us so warmly. Also our thanks to Anne Hickling for sorting the accommodation and dealing with things over the weekend.

We look forward to Ireland in September next year.

Sarah Brown

Total Points

  Relays Individual Total
England 130 153 283
Ireland 40 63 103
Scotland 90 136 226
Wales 50 69 119

Relay Points

  MWM WMW Total
England 64 66 130
Ireland 14 26 40
Scotland 46 44 90
Wales 30 20 50

Individual Points

  M35 W35 M40 W40 M45 W45 M50 W50 M55 W55 M60 W60 M65 W65 Totals
Eng 7 3 14 15 11 15 13 15 15 9 13 13 5 5 153
Ire 0 1 5 3 8 5 10 4 8 4 5 6 3 1 63
Sco 5 7 12 11 13 10 9 11 10 10 13 11 7 7 136
Wal 3 5 5 7 4 5 4 6 3 13 5 5 1 3 69