Country diary: 'Bilbo' Bagness maps the terrain for cunning runners

Cumbrian athlete Hannah Cleary-Hughes orienteering in Lakeland. Photograph: Kilian Imhof

A sea fret creeping in from Morecambe Bay has me baffled. The ancient ride I’ve been following through a corner of the Bigland Hall estate is covered in fog. Normally my compass’s needle points to magnetic north no matter which way I turn. Today? Useless. The needle spins around like a roulette wheel. With visibility down to a few metres, I’m lost. I have the verges to guide me, but is the Flookburgh-Haverthwaite road still to my right? Or have I inadvertently turned through 180 degrees, so that the B5278 is now to my left and I am walking back the way I came?

Cumbrian orienteer Martin ‘Bilbo’ Bagness mapping for an orienteering event. Photograph: Tony Greenbank

A ghostly apparition looms ahead, materialising into someone I know. It’s Martin “Bilbo” Bagness, former coach of the British orienteering team. Who better to confirm whether I’m heading in the right direction.

He is mapping the terrain for a future race. More detailed than their Ordnance Survey counterparts, his maps help orienteers choose their own routes on the hoof. Runners have to visit checkpoints in a set order, but how they get there is up to them. Some may prefer to take challenging short cuts, through trees, say; others to circumnavigate obstacles. It’s not for nothing that the sport’s nickname is “cunning running”.

By Bigland Tarn, which I now see appearing in lifting mist, a runner can align the tarn’s shape on the map with its actual watery configuration. Once so orientated, the map identifies terrain features in every direction.

When I mention my recalcitrant compass, Bilbo laughs. Orienteers call this the Bigland Triangle. There’s an underground metal pipe here that deflects the compasses that every runner needs to carry.

Martin Bagness says: ‘Orienteering maps show the ground in far more detail than Ordnance Survey maps. They are blown up to a larger scale so they can be easily read on the move, even in the darkest forest. This map section covers an area 500m x 500m. Contour lines are specially surveyed to depict every dip and rise in the land. Small boulders, crags and marshes are shown. White on the map represents wooded areas, green is dense woodland which would impede progress and yellow shows clearings. The pink circles on the map show the location of control points, each on a distinctive feature, which the orienteer must visit in the order shown.’ Photograph: Courtesy of Martin Bagness

As visibility returns and with it the limpid haze-free light that photographers crave, I am rewarded with the distant bulk of Ulverston’s Hoad Hill, with its 100ft replica of the Eddystone lighthouse commemorating Sir John Barrow (1764 1848), the town’s most famous son. Having learned to navigate by the stars and the sun as a boy, he went on to become a naval administrator and traveller, and mapped tracts of South Africa never depicted before. He would surely have approved of orienteering.