Archers Kiss

On Saturday I went to Black cat Archery in Sevenhampton near Swindon with some friends to go round their archery course. A few weeks ago I had a try at archery at a country show and loved it, which gave my friend the idea of going around this course.

When you arrive at Black Cat Archery you pay your £10 and have a go at shooting with the bow and arrow in the practice area with a trainer, before you are allowed to go out round the woodland course. During the practice I gained what is known as an “Archers Kiss” which is really rather painful! If you twist your arm so that the inside of your elbow is pointing up, the inside of your elbow can get hit with the string of the bow upon release. After hitting my elbow twice the trainer gave me an elbow guard. In typical sods law fashion once I had the elbow guard on I stopped twisting my elbow in and so didn’t hit myself again.

Each day the bruise grows darker.
The targets that we shot at during the practice session were the typical circular targets, but once we got out onto the course I saw that the targets were foam animals!

Bears, Deer, Big Cats, a Badger were all merrily shot at; some more successfully than others!  Each foam animal has ‘kill zones’ marked out on it which if you were doing a competition you’d have to hit to score. As we were doing it just for fun we scored ourselves if we hit the foam animal irrelevant of where the arrow hit. It was quite a laugh following the arrows that pointed us in the direction of the next target. One of the arrows lead us to a 4ft high platform we had to stand on which gave a different perspective to shooting at the target. Inevitably we did loose 3 arrows out of the 16 that were given to the 4 of us at the start, but we found 4 as we went round.

If you are in the Swindon, Wiltshire area and fancy being Katniss Everdeen for the day, or your children would love to imagine they are Merida for awhile, then you should give Black Cat Archery a try. There are about 25 targets and it takes between 2-3 hours to get round all 25 targets and considering it is only £10 per person is an absolutely bargain of a summer activity!