Taking Part

Archers can take part in the sport at many levels from Club to International, and there are lots of awards badges and records you can go for. Scotland has a very full tournament calendar including Indoor and Outdoor County and Scottish Championships held each year. Many archers go to compete just for enjoyment, others compete to win a medal and to score enough points to get a County, Regional or National ranking and selection to a County or the Scottish squad and team. There are several annual competitions where Scottish archers can get representative honours. These events are detailed on our Senior and Junior Pages.

Additionally for those prepared to travel there are target tournaments all round England, Wales & Northern Ireland. There is an Archery GB Team and Squads, and GNAS hosts the British Championships and Junior Championships, and the Home Nations rotate an Inter Nations event each year.

In 2006 Scottish Teams competed at the Commonwealth Cup in Jamshedpur in India and brought back three Bronze medals from the team events and two individual silver medals. In 2010 at Delhi, archery is once more to be included in the Commonwealth Games and Scotland have archers who are training to win a place on the team.

Over the years there have frequently been Scottish archers on the GB Teams taking part and winning medals in International Competitions, and also at International events run under the auspices of the International Paralympic Committee(IPC). Currently we have several archers on each of the Archery GB Senior, Junior and IPC Development Squads.

If you click on the image you will see a bigger image. This is an archery tournament taking place in Stirling and can be seen on Google maps, the archers have just started to go up to the targets to score their arrows.

Opportunity for All

Disabled archers compete alongside able bodied archers, shooting the same rounds with archers on their target scoring and pulling arrows for them as neccessary. The SAA also runs a Disabled Championships each year as does each Region of GNAS who also hosts a British Disabled Championships. There is also a special round for visually impaired archers where the target stays fixed at 30 metres distance and the target face is increased in size instead of the target changing distance. You can read more about archery for the Blind at British Blind Sport Archery.

Equipment

There have been many developments in archery equipment over the years with the the innovation of the flat bow limb leading to the modern bows in use today, the Olympic take down recurve with its computer machined riser and also the compound bow. This mean today that Longbows, Olympic Recurves and Compound Bows all take part in archery today. Only the Olympic Recurve bow is shot at the Olympics, but the compound bow is used in a divison of the Paralympics. For an understanding of bows recognised for target competition in Britain please see this page about bowstyles.

Early Years

An early form of archery practise consisted of shooting at a small white disc placed on a purpose built mound of turf called a butt. To save measuring the distances arrows fell from the disc, through time, what we would nearly recognise as a modern day target was developed with its 5 colour zones. In GNAS rounds today the 5 zone scoring system used comes from a round where from 1792 George, Prince of Wales prescribed the rules. The shooting was at 100, 80, and 60 yards, know as the Prince's Lengths, on 4ft., 3 ft., and 2ft. targets, 3 arrows at each end, the double ends of 6 arrows being know as "rounds", and the scoring 9, 7, 5, 3, 1 called the "Prince's Reckoning".

It is worth noting that the current St George is equivalent to 6 rounds at each distance. In 1844 the first Grand National Meeting was held at York, the round shot was called the York Round and has remained as 72 arrows at 100 yards, 48 at 80 yards and 24 at 60 yards ever since. For FITA rounds the coloured rings are halved by a black line and scored from 10 for an inner gold to 1 for an outer white.