Organiser's Comments

Organising Norman's Law was a game of two halves. All of the on-site organisation was tremendously 
straightforward, thanks to an accommodating landowner and benign locations for start and finish. 
Dr Thomas, the owner of Denmuir farm, was wonderfully helpful, providing excellent parking, a 
massive covered area (with power) for registration/download, and a field for the string course. 
He was happy just to see people making good use of the countryside. Many thanks to him (and to 
Frank Bethune for his generous offer of overflow parking at Ayton farm that was, in the end, not required).

The "dark side" of the organisational mountain was the onus of combining of CompassSport Trophy and 
a SOSOL with punching starts. I decided to invite (optional) pre-entries for two main reasons: 
(1) to get a better idea for the likely number of competitors (and, hence, maps) given that several 
other events were happening on the same weekend; and 
(2) to try to reduce the inevitable queues and on-the-day madness that would result from trying to 
register and coordinate team entries in addition to standard colour-coded entrants. 

Inevitably, of course, I failed to adequately provide for the many different types of people who 
would be approaching the registration team. People entering on the day, people pre-entered but 
needing to pay and/or hire an SI, people pre-entered but without a start time allocated by their 
club or wanting to change it and/or needing to pay and/or hire an SI... yes, well. Apologies to both 
those in the queue and to the beleagured registration team. One thing I shall also personally 
note for future reference - never put hired and returned SI cards back into the box until the 
end of the event, they can get accidentally re-hired and then all sorts of chaos happens in the 
SI event file!

Special thanks to all Interlopers (and FVO and ELO!) helpers on the day, who thwarted my best 
attempts at dis-organisation and ensured ran an efficient event. The car parking team in particular 
had great fun squeezing you all into the paddock like some kind of intricate industrial-size jigsaw 
puzzle. All comments I had from competitors both on the day and by mail afterwards, seemed to 
indicate that the area and courses proved to be very enjoyable - great, and the notes of thanks 
were much appreciated.

Congratulations to ESOC, FVO and TAY - good luck in the CST final at Greenham Common!

Planners comments.

Norman's Law presents three challenges to the planner: climb, fences and
visibility.  With three open hills and the forest to climb into, I 
sacrificed some of the up-and-down diagonal legs which look good taken 
alone.  Similarly, a few legs were slightly compromised to make 
going through gates a possibility.  The concave slope of 
Normans Law means 
that pretty well all the sites were visible from most places.  This led to
a lot of raising and lowering flags to make them less beaconlike, but 
by Sunday morning you needed sharp eyes and an accurate bearing to 
see one control from the previous. 

The PeelLandSurveys map had  about a 2m cutoff on rock, with only truly 
vertical cliffs mapped.  This made control sites hard to find. 16 of the 19 
features used on the old map I had were unmapped! Richard Webb and I added
a few smaller features and remapped a lot of vegetation (if you wandered 
off line you might have encountered more that could have been changed!). 
Also the gorse was changed from striped to solid green which allowed some 
of the cut-throughs to be marked. 

Having to include the CompassSport Trophy heat into the SoSoL was far from 
ideal and caused us a few headaches - a few very fast and very slow times 
can, I think, be attributed to people running out of class for CST 
purposes.    Congratulations to ESOC on winning, and FVO and TAY our other
representatives in the final. 

Thanks to Brad for organising and Norma for controlling.  Norman's Law has
been unused for over 20 years, and for most of us it was a delight to find
such a good "new" area: I'm sure we'll be back soon.