SPEEDY Santa and racing reindeer strapped on their beards and yanked on their antlers to take part in the Hash House Harriers Santa Dash.

Every year for the past eight years the North Wiltshire branch of the club – which is often described as a drinking club with a running problem – have hosted the charity run around Coate Water to raise money for Prospect Hospice and other local charities.

This year hundreds of children and adults turned out for the event yesterday and chased around the chilly beauty spot to help raise more than £2,500.

Roger Sommerville, one of the organisers of this year’s run, said: “It went excellently, everything went like clockwork.

“We’ve been doing it for such a long time now that everyone has their own job to do and it just runs so smoothly.

“We had around 374 people in total take part and although some people were a little bit late for the 11am start, it went really well.

“I think we’ve raised around £2,500 this year.

“It is just brilliant when you think we started off raising £400 or £500.

“We started in 2006 raising money for Prospect Hospice with just 80 Santas running round the town centre and now so many people have turned out.”

This year money raised from the event will go to Prospect Hospice, Thamesdown Hydrotherapy Pool and Swindon Women’s Aid.

Roger said: “We used to raise money JUST for the Prospect and then when we began to raise a lot we said that the first £1,000 would go to Prospect and the rest could go to other charities.

“They are still all local charities rather than national ones and our members choose them.

“All the money raised from registration goes to these charities.

“We would not be able to do this if we did not have the support from local businesses.

“Everyone donates something and gets involved just so all the money can go to the charities.

“The support of the Sun Inn at Coate has been essential to the staging of this event and our sponsors, Milton Road Osteopaths, Busy Bees Children’s Day Nursery and Select Line Kitchen and Flooring Studio, have kindly covered our expenseS.”

Over the years the event has grown so popular that registration NOW has to be limited to just 350.

Roger said: “One of our members’ parents had to go into Prospect Hospice, and we’d seen Santa Dashes in other cities and thought it was something that we could try out here.

“The event has grown in support and we had to move to Coate Water to accommodate more runners and walkers.”