Frocester - W-NW

Frocester can be a frustrating site as it is often affected by a sea breeze pushing up the Severn Estuary; this pulls the wind from a nicely-soarable WNW to an unsoarable SW and kills the thermal activity. (The photo looks marginally north of west) The site often works best after the passing of a cold front, i.e. half an hour to two hours afterwards.

Take Off is in the centre of the photo, just above the car park at the bottom - you can see a hangy rigged there (next to the non-PG-friendly tree!). The barbed wire fence is here. As you can see, Take Off is in a bowl that is used to gain height before flying to the right, then soaring above the ridge of trees that lead off into the bottom right corner of the photo. The trig point, for checking true wind direction, is on the point of the picnic/walking field, on the left edge of the bowl, a quarter of the way in from the left of the photo. To its left is a larger bowl that is flyable, for experienced pilots, in a WSW wind but there is NO LANDING on this side.

Side landing for PGs (and extremely adventurous HGs!) is the thin strip of grass between the tree-lined ridge and the road that snakes through the middle of the picture - it is a lot steeper than it appears here (due to the angle of the shot). If you are very careful you can also top land on Take Off - you MUST NOT land ANYWHERE else on top, specifically not in the picnic area surrounding the car park or the fields that start below the road in the very bottom of the picture. The HG bottom landing is over a quarter of a mile away to the right.

Photo courtesy of Tom Mayne.