Simon – Bendrigg tutor and orienteering activity lead
In a few words, what is orienteering? Orienteering is a challenge where you use some form of mapping to find particular markers in a particular area, a bit like a treasure hunt. It’s a great introduction to accessible adventures and helps groups explore Bendrigg independently.
It’s a great way to get a group visiting us at Bendrigg exploring the grounds (especially when they have first arrived) and has loads of positives that go along with that.
What orienteering looks like at Bendrigg
At Bendrigg, we work with each group before they even arrive to decide what course works best for the participants and their needs. This means every session is tailored as one of our accessible adventure activities, ensuring everyone can take part.
Orienteering Courses for Every Ability
We have traditional orienteering markers across each orienteering course, where each marker is numbered and labelled.
We have adapted orienteering courses, like the rainbow course, where each marker has a difference colour and pattern on it and you can actually collect a symbol from that marker when you find it. We find this particular course can work well to give more structure to orienteering for people with various learning disabilities.
We also have a photo trail where the map essentially is a photograph of what you want to find, so you can see when you are physically at that location. This is something I am currently developing to make even better.
Our orienteering courses are flexible to match different abilities. For example. on one of our courses, all the markers are findable from a pathway, making it a really good one for wheelchair users. We have various difficulties, going all the way up to the hardest one (which we call the Master Course) where you have to find all the markers.
The locations of the markers have been chosen to give a spread of various places around the grounds at Bendrigg. They’re findable but not too obvious! The locations get the group to explore independently without us having to take them around the site, making it an activity with more flexibility and freedom.
What Makes an Orienteering Map Different?
What makes an orienteering map different is the way it helps participants locate checkpoints quickly and accurately.
Our new orienteering map has been a project of mine over the past year. We wanted our orienteering maps to be both accurate and as accessible as possible.
As it happened, we actually had a contact with Martin Bagners, a World Orienteering Championship silver medallist, renowned for his own highly accurate mapping skills. He agreed to make a map of the site for us.
Martin and I worked together to make this new map both as accurate and as accessible as possible. For example, most standard maps have contour lines to show the differences in height of the ground, but we felt that that added a bit of confusion and wasn’t essential for us, so that was one of the things that I asked him to take out. It’s been a great experience working with Martin, and getting input from other Bendrigg tutors to get everything just right; it definitely benefitted from all the different perspectives. It was about finding that balance between making sure we had the right standard of map without making it inaccessible to the variety of people of different abilities who come to Bendrigg.
What to Expect During an Orienteering Session
Even once we have chosen the right course for the group, there are still different ways of running it to make it the right fit. With some groups, we can just show them how the map works and send them off, or to make sure they’re understanding it we can say “go find this one and then come back to me” to do one marker at a time and then build up from there. For a lot of people, it is brand new, so we are always happy to explain the maps and anything else – it’s something to get their heads around.
Sometimes it might not be as independent of an activity because participants need assistance from their staff. But it is still independent in that they don’t need Bendrigg staff to take them around, they’ve got familiar staff with them helping whilst they’re getting used to being at Bendrigg together.
All the choices we make are based on getting to know the group, and from experience we can get a feel quite quickly after meeting them of what is going to be the best way to lead the adventure.
The Benefits of Orienteering for Confidence and Independence
One of our main aims at Bendrigg is to support people in developing independence and personal agency through accessible orienteering experiences.
I find that I often see a change in participants’ sense of independence during orienteering, I think because it’s an activity where there’s a tangible achievement. Finding a marker gives that instant positive feedback, which is an awesome feeling. That opportunity for independent achievement gives people space to grow their confidence and be more independent for the rest of their visit at Bendrigg and hopefully afterwards too. Orienteering can bring people out of their shell in a little bit of a different way to the other activities, and helps people create and strengthen friendships within their teams.
One of the useful aspects of orienteering from a practical point of view is (obviously) teaching map reading skills, which can have a real positive impact on the cognitive side of things. Using a map to navigate the area through pictures and symbols gets people translating information on paper into what they see on the ground and thinking about Bendrigg’s site from a different viewpoint. There are clues on the back of the map hinting at where the marker might be hidden, so when a participant gets to the location on their map, they’ve got to problem solve to find the marker in the space around them. Orienteering is a really fun way to develop spatial awareness, critical thinking, and problem solving.
Real Orienteering Stories
There’s a group that’s just been here recently that split into little teams to do orienteering, which the teachers arranged according to their interests. One of the teams ended up just gradually making their way down to the play area and going on the swing, so their orienteering session was mostly on the swing just enjoying it independently, and that was great! And there were also some groups that were much more involved with the activity and got really immersed in it. There was one individual in particular who was super keen on it and came and told me what he liked and what needed improving on the orienteering course; he gave some really good feedback on what I need to work on for next time he’s here, which was fantastic because he was already thinking about next time!
It is really interesting to see how different people engage with orienteering (and the outdoors in general) in different ways. We want people to adventure on their own terms and orienteering at Bendrigg really allows that kind of freedom of choice.
The Future of Accessible Orienteering
I’m excited about continuing to make the most of our new map now it’s been in use for about a month. We can use it to teach advanced map skills (which will be especially great for Duke of Edinburgh groups) and have been talking about introducing compasses and teaching the skills to go with them too.
Looking to the future for our participants, if anyone seems really enthusiastic after trying orienteering at Bendrigg, we’ll talk to them about the possibility of joining a club near where they live. If someone can experience an activity for the first time at Bendrigg and enjoy it so much that they continue with it afterwards, that’s a massive success for everyone involved and could inspire many more Lake District adventures in the future.
There are lots of new possibilities for orienteering adventures ahead of us.
