Well, little has changed, unfortunately. Coillte are reportedly doing an audit of all the permanent orienteering courses to see what condition they are in. There is still lack of clarity about who is responsible for maintaining the courses: Coillte funded their construction and provided the materials and manpower, and host the downladable maps on the Coillte Outdoors web site; the orienteering clubs simply ensured that the posts were put in the right place. Another issue is the updating of the maps to reflect changes in the forest.
Some of the missing posts are due to vandalism but I think some are due to damage by forestry activity.
3ROC put a note on the club website ( http://www.3roc.net/index.php/events/ ) to warn intending users of the courses about the missing posts. The main difficulty with the Ticknock course is that it\'s the first few posts which are missing, so people may give up: if one did the course in reverse you would maybe have enough confidence to know that the posts were missing.
We have contacted Coillte again to see what they propose to do. They have recently extended the MTB trails on Ticknock and this would have cost a lot more than replacing a few wooden posts to restore the POC.
POC\'s are a potentially great way to let people try basic orienteering so this situation is far from satisfactory, but Ticknock is not the only casualty: for example, Hellfire Woods have had sections closed off because of storm damage and felling; Marlay Park (SDCC) no longer seems to have a POC at all.

So, for Tommy, if you contact 3roc@orienteering.ie we\'ll see if we can help you in some way.

John McCullough
3ROC

Situation on Hellfire is worse with half the posts gone and many of the ones left are overgrown! Massy\'s is a bit better but there is the issue of missing posts affecting all 3 courses, in addition to out of date map.

I\'ve just fired off an email to Dublin mountains partnership end of Coillte. Please share if you find a point of contact that will deal with updating and maintaining the POCs

A review of POC\'s in Coillte forests has been done recently and work is continuing on revising the maps and restoring the POCs, supported by Coillte and the Dublin Mountains Partnership.

The permanent orienteering courses at Ticknock/Three Rock Wood have now been revised and the O-map updated. You can download the maps here.
Thanks to Coillte for supporting this initiative and to Pat Healy for revising the courses and updating the map. Three Rock Wood is one of the forests in the Dublin area earmarked by Coillte for recreational use rather than for commercial forestry.

John McC
3ROC