In order to join the club you must either already be a member of Archery GB or have completed a beginners’ course either at our club, or through another archery club. Please see our Beginners’ Courses page for details.
After completing your Beginners’ Course with us, you will be invited to attend the two subsequent Sunday mornings free of charge. After this, you will need to join the club in order to continue shooting with us. There is a small discount on your initial subscription for having completed our beginners’ course. Our membership fees are detailed on our Club Fees page.
The club meets every Sunday morning at 9:30 (depending on the weather) but attendance is purely optional. We also potentially have more informal meets on Friday afternoons/early evenings during the summer. See Location & Times for more details.
When you join, you will be invited to join the club’s WhatsApp group which is our main way of communicating club news and when/if there are any cancellations or changes to shooting plans. There is a small amount of general chat too – we are a very friendly club! Juniors are allowed to join the WhatsApp group with a parent’s or guardian’s permission.
Members are expected to “muck-in” with setting-up and putting away of all the equipment, hence the start time of 9.30am; it takes half an hour to get everything set up. Don’t worry, we won’t expect you to know what to do straight away, you’ll be shown the ropes all in good time. We generally start shooting at 10am. Depending on what rounds are being shot, and what the weather is doing, we finish anytime between 11.30-1pm. There is no obligation to stay to the end of a shoot every time; you will have a better idea of your own progress, however, if you are able to score complete rounds.
For more detail on a typical shooting day with the club, see our A Typical Shoot page.
For complete beginners to archery, we would recommend that you don’t rush into buying your own equipment. After completing a beginners’ course with us, you will continue to have full use of the club’s bows and arrows until they are needed for the next course. A set of fairly basic recurve archery gear will probably start somewhere in the region of £200 and will go up from there. Some items can be bought online, but ideally you will be properly assessed/fitted for a bow/arrows by someone who knows what they’re talking about. Expensive mistakes can be made if you buy online without knowing exactly what you’re after. See our Archery Equipment page for more information, and for some useful links to local archery shops and resources.
If you would like to know a little more about the club, feel free to come down to see us, and chat with us, on our of our regular shoots (see Location & Times), take a look at more pages on our website, or send us a message.