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Hive Beach |  |
Permanent Orienteering Course at Burton Bradstock
established by the National Trust and Wimborne Orienteers, 2023
Hive Beach occupies a gap in the Jurassic Coast cliffs half-a-mile south of Burton Bradstock. It is near the eastern end of Chesil Beach, a shingle barrier running 18 miles along the Dorset coast from West Bay to Portland.
Hive Beach is signposted from the B3157 Burton Bradstock-Weymouth road at SY 491 892. There is ample parking on National Trust land, grid ref SY 491 888. Parking charges start from £3.30 for 2 hours. Payment can be made by coins or PayByPhone. If you are a National Trust member, please scan your card in the machine.
Should you need refreshment, come and sample the delights on offer at the Hive Beach Café! Toilets are maintained by Hive Beach Café and open to the public during opening hours.
The cliffs each side of the beach are magnificent but prone to erosion and rockfalls. Do not approach the edge if walking along the coast path above. Also, be aware that it is dangerous to venture along the beach below the cliffs to the west (marked 'Forbidden Route' on the maps).
The Courses
West of Hive Beach is a peninsula bounded by Lyme Bay and the River Bride and its estuary. A Short Course (1.7km) and Long Course (3.1km) have been set up here. Both are fairly easy and suitable for non-orienteers. They are Yellow standard with a few physically harder controls on the Long Course.
The red-and-white control markers are fixed to existing wooden structures - gates, posts etc. The challenge is to find the markers and write down their 2-letter codes. Then check your answers: Short or Long.
You can also do these as virtual courses using the UsynligO phone app. They are listed as 'Hive Beach West'. If you are new to UsynligO, there is a guide here.
For good navigators, we have published two more technical courses on UsynligO:
Score - 20 controls in any order, no time limit
Short Technical - 1.5km course linking 16 of the controls.
They use the small but tricky Bind Barrow area and are listed as 'Hive Beach East'. GPS reception seems good; I set the app control radius to 15m on a Google Pixel 6 and found it perfectly OK.
The area was mapped & courses planned by Mike Kite (Wimborne Orienteers) in 2021-23 using Ocad & Purple Pen. In case of comments or queries, email mike.kite@hotmail.co.uk
Wimborne Orienteers thanks The National Trust for permission to map this area and for their active support of orienteering in West Dorset.
Background photograph: looking west from Bind Barrow above Hive Beach. You can see the flat top of Golden Cap (191m), the highest point on the south coast, and the southward sweep of the Devon coast.
