Ecotrails Revival in N Ireland: Awareness – Appreciation – Understanding

Ecotrails are a series of educational resources to navigate and explore the local environment using an orienteering map.

Participants can study Geography, History and Science in a fun way, with some Physical Education along the trail.  The Initiative was established by the late Colin Henderson MBE, Northern Ireland Orienteering Association (NIOA) recognised with so many people home-schooling across the country, now would be a great time to relaunch the trails with an update.

Club volunteers have been working hard behind the scenes as ‘trail rangers’ to report back to the Ecotrails team on maps, posts and the resources.
A huge thank you to these club members and a special mention to Bill Simpson and Stephen Gilmore (Lagan Valley Orienteers).  Bill has been busy ensuring that each Ecotrail and associated Permanent Orienteering Course are plotted on the most recent map survey available.  Stephen Gilmore then added all the information to a new page and POC portal accessed from Maps>Ecotrails.

You can read all about the Ecotrails and how to get started here.

Stephen Gilmore, NIOA Secretary and key driver in the Ecotrails Revival, says: 
“In the home-schooling environment, we realised that we had been sitting on an excellent resource that hadn’t been promoted in recent years.  The Ecotrail resources themselves had been written in such a generic way that minor changes to the map and even missing posts made little difference.  So, we embarked on a project to plot the Ecotrails on the latest version of maps and asking local orienteers to check each site.  Out of the 19 original Ecotrails we found that 18 were still valid, with only a town bypass being constructed on an area scuppering one.  The British Orienteering Permanent Orienteering Course (POC) portal has been a perfect platform for hosting the Ecotrail information and easily keeping reports of missing posts etc up to date."