Just arrived in Germany, I have already reset the home position of the mount as in the Eqmod link and reset the park position.
Done a few dry run, slew to target east and west of Polaris and the scope moves in the right direction, this is without sync'd (it's not dark yet and there are clouds for the next few few nights).
just went back to my observatory for another random test, and to my surprise, on startup despite leaving the scope as 'parked' on shutdown earlier today, the mount was 'unparked', red cross-air in Kstars pointing near Polaris.... Not sure what the hell has happened there