SH3 run locations have trends.  In the past year there seems to have been a strange fascination with areas near the A3 and Woking, only rarely have runs been set in the Low Weald, so Leigh made a pleasant change, as did a joint run with OCH. Leigh is one of those distinctively mid Surrey villages which still has a venerable pub, the Plough, opposite a still older church, next to a traditional village green, but to be totally up to date it also had leaky water mains needing a minor repair and therefore four-way traffic lights.

  Why is this Leigh pronounced Lie and not Lee? No one knows, but the word Leigh is derived from an ancient Anglo Saxon one meaning a meadow and even that word is derived from a still earlier proto Indo European word of the same meaning, Lowkos, which also gave us Lucozade. Probably. On our arrival the Hare was spotted using a minute teaspoon to lay an extension to the start of the trail. He explained that there was still trail from ‘several weeks earlier’, but not to worry as he had laid the rest of the trail on Saturday. Which Saturday he meant wasn’t entirely clear, but in his Hare Talk Flash explained there was a choice of trails, five, four or three miles in length, shortcuts all clearly marked SC as appropriate. Except where the locals had helpfully scrubbed the trail out, so a Checking Chicken was pressganged from the somewhat depleted ranks of SH3 Top Athletes. The out trail was up Church Road and led off on a path through parched fields of stubble, lush green meadows were in short supply. Atalanta was briefly delayed in explaining to a villager that the white blobs were just trail markings and were totally safe as the white powder was just our normal mix of Anthrax spores and dog poison. The front runners were fast vanishing into the distance, very unusual for SH3 and possibly explained by the fact that the front runners were mostly from OCH, not SH3. At Flanchford Road there was an option of making the trail a lefthander, but sensibly Flash eschewed this since it would involve too much blacktop. It was to be a right hander. On the busy road there were prominent signs advertising Mooning Hole school where it seems dyslexia was taught, but shortly after the school, the trail turned off the road and into a very dry meadow by the Mole. There is a surprisingly large area to the east of Leigh with no roads, theoretically hashable, but inconveniently, partly footpath free and divided in two by an unbridged stetch of the river Mole. The southernmost end of this area is at the village of Irons Bottom, now sadly without the Three Horseshoes pub. Irons Bottom records the traditional Surrey craft of bottom ironing, now replaced by Brazilian Butt Lifts but long before reaching that village, after turning south, things became a little more confused and increasingly interrupted by stiles. Lots of stiles. Well built stiles, old stiles, new stiles, rickety old stiles flanked by blood sucking brambles and very rickety indeed old stiles. I pointed out the number of stiles to the Hare at the On In, ‘Oh yes’, he said ‘I noticed that too’.

  Do You?, defending him, asked me what was wrong with stiles. In principle, there is nothing wrong with stiles, but when there are too many of them on just one hash trail, they do spread the pack out. If a particularly rickety stile takes an average of 20 seconds to climb over safely, a pack of 30 will take ten minutes to get past it, meaning the front runners will be two fields ahead by the time the last of the knitting circle have climbed over. The spreading of the pack caused by stiles can be controlled by setting difficult checks, so here I think Flash did rather well, but some of the stiles on this trail were so rickety that the less agile members of the pack really struggled. Briefly in a gap between stiles your scribe was almost front running, behind Doug, when the trail vanished into a field. ‘Where’s the Hare gone?’ asked Doug, ‘The trail just stops.” Yes Doug, it’s called a check, but this one caught me too and, failing to catch up, I think I was on the short trail from there on. There was a longish stretch of gravel trackways before the trail turned towards home and, once again, open, parched, countryside.

  On Friday I had been sent a text by Louise Haigh from the new UK Government HQ in Manchester telling me not to set fire to the countryside, but Red Lou hasn’t quite got the hang of distribution lists and accidentally copied my message to everyone in the country! Even so, to avoid any chance of the immense heat from my rapid progress through the countryside setting fire to anything, I slowed down, enjoyed the views and kept Lou happy. Sauntering over a last low hill, the Mole Gap could be admired in the distance [hmm… Fanny Sniffing?], but the village was hidden by trees and still several fields and yet more stiles away. As the pack came to the On In and the last field before the village, OCH youngsters who had been on the full trail raced past in a terrible display of Athleticism. This may have its place in European Athletics championships, but not on the hash. Although no longer quite scorchio weather, a cold beer in the shade of a tree was welcome, the peace only briefly shattered by the arrival of a crazed aspiring Hells Angel on a 75cc moped, yes, it was Scud. At the Circle, the GM gave Mrs G a down-down for surviving another year with Uncle Gerry, the Hare was punished for being the Hare and the RA gave Belgrano a drink for being completely knocked over by the eclipse. There was also a long joke told jointly with Lay By about unlikely exercises for, according to my notes, female memory enhancement, the male equivalent explain the RA’s simply enormous, er, repertoire of terrible jokes.
  Long after the end of the Circle, Le Pro arrived, unusually delayed as he helped the two least agile members of the Hash over the stiles, they too arrived back. Apart from those stiles, the trail, where not rubbed out, was fine and it was nice to visit the area without needing flippers, as is so often the case in wet winters. Nice pub too!

  On On,
  Eveready