A reading contest that comes round with the seasons. Each edition opens with a starting line, runs for a set stretch of weeks, and closes with a board of certified places and £100 shared between them.
Taking part is simply reading. There is nothing to enter and nothing to sign: every reader with an account is in from the moment an edition opens, and the Scribbles you earn — reading stories, passing quizzes, leaving comments, completing exercises — are what rank you.
Two things, and they are the whole of it.
It is seasonal. There is an edition in the spring, one in the summer, one in the autumn and one in the winter.
The pool is £100. Every edition puts the same £100 on the table. How it is divided — how many places pay, and what each one pays — is set for each edition and printed on its board before it opens.
Everything else. An edition has no fixed date and no fixed length. One may run a month; the next may run a fortnight. We set the window when we set the edition, and we would rather say so here than print a calendar we then have to break.
So this page will never tell you when the next edition begins. The edition’s own board will — it carries its dates, its window, its prize table and its terms, and it is the only page that can be right about them. When one is coming, it is announced, and the banner across the site changes to say the programme is on.
It opens with a baseline. Before the first minute of the window, everyone’s Scribbles total is recorded. An edition ranks what you earn after that mark, so a reader who has been here for years and a reader who joined that morning start the edition level.
The board runs live, and says so. While an edition is open the standings move as readers read, and they are marked provisional throughout — because they are a display of a running total, not a result.
It closes on the certified count. When the window ends, the leading readers’ totals are rebuilt from their actual record — quizzes taken, comments made, stories read — cut precisely at the closing second. Points that cannot be traced to real reading come off. Those are the places that pay, and once the closing capture is taken the board freezes and stays that way.
The board stays up. A closed edition is not taken down. Its board, its standings and its terms remain at their own address for good.
The Island’s all-time leaderboard is a separate thing from the programme, and no edition touches it. It carries across seasons: nothing is zeroed when an edition opens, and nothing is zeroed when one closes.
That is deliberate, and it follows from editions being different lengths. A fortnight in autumn cannot be compared with a month of summer — the reader who won the longer edition simply had longer — so a board that reset each season would be measuring the calendar as much as the reading. The cumulative board is the only one that means the same thing from one season to the next, which is why it is the one that never starts again.
Summer 2026 — 1 – 31 August 2026. 13 places, £100 shared. Closed and certified; its terms stand as they were written.
Questions about the programme go to contact@calvaryscribblings.co.uk. Each edition’s own terms are the ones that bind it.