Bannockburn Clout Weekend, including the Scottish Archery Clout Championships

By Ciaran Murphy

The weekend of June 20/21 saw Bannockburn Bowmen host 44 archers from all across the UK compete in 2 days of Clout competition.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather as we’d had torrential rain in the few days leading up to the competition, and luckily our ground conditions were ok for the shoot. Unfortunately for Prestwick St Cuthberts, their competition scheduled for the same day had to be cancelled because of a waterlogged field. We were fortunate that some of the archers entered there came to us instead.

The fun began on Friday evening as we had a practice/instruction session led by Peter Gregory of Goldcrest Archers. Multiple national champion and record holder in both recurve and compound, he gave expert instruction to around a dozen clout novices, and to some of the more experienced archers too.

Day 1 dawned bright and breezy. The round for the day was a Double Metric round, so 185mts for open Compounds, 165mts for the open all other bowstyles, and 125m for Ladies, and this was also the Championship round. The scoring circle is 7.5 mts in radius, each of the 5 colour zones being 1.5 mts wide. The headwind throughout the day was a bit challenging, sometimes causing arrows to fall short, and occasionally not blowing at all, so arrows went long! One of the many joys (!) for a clouter.

At the end of the day, 10 archers were awarded gold medals and title of Scottish Clout champion, (see table below), and a number of Scottish records were broken.

Day 2 was warmer but crucially also calmer. The round was a Double Imperial, 180 yds for open, and 140yds for ladies. This time though, the scoring zone is much smaller, a mere 12 ft radius, with the gold section (the clout) being only 3 feet across. Scores are consequently much lower than a metric.

Full results are available on the Events page, here.

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Scottish Archery would like to thank the team at Bannockburn Bowmen for planning and organising the event.