It’s All Downhill From Here

Sunday afternoon in the rolling Lincolnshire Wolds… blue skies, a late summer breeze, picnics on the grass, and home-made soapbox carts hurtling down a hill at 40mph!

If you’ve never been to the Belchford Downhill

Challenge near Horncastle you’re missing a treat. Every year the village welcomes around 3,000 spectators for a celebration of English eccentricity: 50 carts speeding from the top of Belchford Hill, powered only by gravity, to see who can negotiate the chicanes and reach the bottom in the fastest time.

This year’s event took place yesterday and will go down in the record books as the first time a cart – driven by Steve Thomas of team C12 – completed the distance in under 50 seconds.

It occurred to us that if our broadband connection speeds were as fast as Steve’s cart we’d all be happy. But sadly, here in Lincolnshire, many people and businesses struggle with pitifully slow broadband speeds.

So to help raise awareness of onlincolnshire, a Lincolnshire County Council campaign to promote the benefits of superfast broadband, we spent the day in Belchford broadcasting the racing to the wider world.

We filmed the action in 2D and 3D video, blogged and tweeted about the event and posted images on Facebook and video on YouTube to showcase just what can be done with a good broadband connection and the latest mobile technologies.

The result was that people who came to the event could watch video taken straight from the on-board Go Pro cameras and uploaded onto TV screens in the online media pitstop, while those who couldn’t be there were able to follow the action online via social media.

Thanks to our friends at the county council, the Lincolnshire Chamber of Commerce, student helper Beth Dyson and social media wizards Celia Lacy and John Popham we created a fantastic buzz around the event and managed to tell an awful lot of people about the onlincolnshire campaign.

Can’t wait till next year. Who knows? We may even enter a team ourselves!