19^th December 2011

 Nene Valley District Scout Network

A very important part of  this summary is the thanks.  Without the support of the following persons we wouldn’t have been able to hold our first activity:

Chele Height (District Commissioner) Providing the use of the building, booking the activities and instructors, providing the BBQ food and preparing it and keeping all tea and coffee flowing.

Tony Knott and Tim Paragreen for agreeing to do the Climbing wall but due to bad weather organising the BBQ for the afternoon.

Tom and Mitch DESC and yes Clare Mitchell for helping with the BBQ cooking

Nev Buzzard and Jim Davis for the Shooting activity

Steve Hoole and Rose Bass – Archery

Our Chief Scout, Bear Grylls, paid a “surprise” visit to Northamptonshire on 19th November 2011.

This was part of his “Bear in the air” tour of the East Midlands Region.

Overstone Scout Campsite was chosen, as the date coincided with 4 local Groups spending the weekend at the site. Very few of the leaders knew until the last minute, and most of the Young people did not know until a helicopter landed in the field in front of the Pack Holiday Centre. Bear specifically asked to visit two small Scouting events of 30-70 people, and Northamptonshire was chosen, along with Derbyshire, to host the smaller events.

Bear was hosted by 17 year old Kimberley Spence from the 46th Northampton Scout Group, who took him on a brief tour of the activities taking place, which included orienteering, tent pitching, air rifle shooting and backwoods cooking. Bear took time on his tour of the site to chat to the Scouts and take part in several of the activities on offer. Bear commented “I have been to several large scale events today, which I have thoroughly enjoyed, but it was nice to attend a smaller event with young people who were spending the weekend together in the spirit of friendship and adventure.”

When Bear visits again, Northamptonshire and Derbyshire will have large scale events, and the other Counties in the Region will hold smaller “surprise” events. These are likely to take place in either 2012 or 2013, and will be well publicised to give everyone the opportunity of seeing the Chief Scout.

Join the Roverway 2012 UK Scout Contingent – Register your interest today!

Roverway 2012 is for ES and Network between 16 and 22 yrs and registration is open until 1st December. It is a joint European WAGGS and WOSM event for Scouts and Guides from Europe and all over the world.

The main event of Roverway 2012 takes place in Finland from 20th – 28th July 2012. It is a nine day event that includes two main parts: path and camp. Roverway will bring together more than 3,000 Scouts and Guides from all over the world – it will be an event not to be missed!

Registration can be on an individual basis, or as a partial patrol of 2-6, or as a full patrol of 15 people.

It is hoped that we can get 6 members from each County. There are currently 25 people registered UK wide and the UK Scout Association would like to take 100-150 people. so if you are interested start planning now!

Costs

- option A (event + return UK travel) – £1,250

- option B (event not including return UK travel and transfers) – £950

Registration for joining the UK contingent is open online now until 1st December. (scouts.org.uk/roverway)

I hope that you agree that the new design and functionality is a great improvement on what we had previously, although this has proved very successful over the last few years and has led to other Counties following our lead in this development.

Our County website is seen as one of many ways that we communicate Northamptonshire Scouting to the world.

New Features

Diary

This will be regularly updated and will contain dates for County Events, County meetings National events such as Gilwell Reunion, Gilwell 24 etc. I will also add any other Scouting events that you would like to publicise to the County, such as Gang Shows, Group or District fund raising events for example.

Facilities

This is an added feature that many have asked for and will contain contact details for District campsites, minibuses for hire, marquees for hire, climbing walls for hire, and in fact anything that you think that your Scouting colleagues could benefit from and you are prepared to hire out. We will not be adding commercial companies to this listing.

If you have any item that you would like added, please send me the details.

Twitter and Facebook

These have both been added with links to our pages from the homepage of the site based on experience from other Counties, this is another useful means of communicating to a wider audience of both adults and young people. These will be carefully monitored using Scout HQ guidelines.

News articles

These will be regularly updated and I would like to encourage everyone to send in some editorial content and a couple of suitable photographs from an event, which could be a camp, sleepover, fund-raising event etc. and we will add this to the website.

I would appreciate you taking a look at our redeveloped website and advising of any improvements, additions or amendments that are required.

Many thanks,

Tony Keay
County Commissioner
Northamptonshire County Scouts 

17th-19th June 2011

It all started as an idea to camp a few Scouts at the County Cub camp so they could witness traditional Scouting in action. This soon developed into a full blown Scout Camping Competition!

Anyway the team set about selecting representatives from each District this ranged from their own camping competition and the resurrection of some very old District Trophies, one in particular that stands almost eight feet tall!!!! Well it’s quite big.

Prior to our event we had six teams, one from each District and plenty of challenges revolving around an original Scouting theme, orienteering, bivi building, first aid, tent pitching, whittling and backwoods cooking.

All was set all we needed was the weather unfortunately, we did get the weather however it wasn’t exactly what had been ordered. Heavy rain over a good part of the early weekend. The good bit was, the young people were well trained and disciplined which helped to keep them all in good spirits.

The weekend was judged on everything the Scouts did during the weekend starting with how they set up their camp site on the Friday evening, this was followed by building a camp gadget before bed.

Saturday morning was a little wet so the inspection was quite important, checking that the site would withstand any further rain. Every meal was judged in respect of hygiene and quality with the ingredients being drawn from an identical central store for each patrol, so breakfast was an important session.

Saturday saw each patrol complete four challenges and an evening session on the air rifle range again adding to the points tally.

Sunday morning took the Scouts back in time with an early morning PT session (yes for points) before breakfast and inspection (more points).

Two more challenge sessions before Sunday lunch and then after lunch a quick tot up of the points to see who had won the new County Camping Competition trophy.

The trophy had been dedicated to Andi Bull who was a Scout Leader who had lost his battle against cancer in 2010 and his parents Bob and Lin had kindly agreed to present the trophy. Finally the points had been added and the teams were gathered for the presentation. Glendon District represented by 1st Kettering Scouts had accumulated the most points closely followed by the other five Districts.

Overall a great effort by all the Districts’, demonstrating that traditional Scouting is still being practiced across Northamptonshire.

Thanks to the District Leaders for organising a great event and special thanks need to go to Karen Malcolmson and Kim Pearce for allowing the Scout section to share their event.

I think we should do it all again next year!

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