Having spent two days in northern Coventry, playing in a Scrabble tournament and thinking extremely hard (no, we didn’t win anything), we wanted a short break in the open air before starting our journey home. We chose War Memorial Park, on the southern side of the city. We thought we would have a walk around and do a gentle bit of geocaching, too.
The park is about 120 acres, or 48.5 hectares, and opened in 1921 as Coventry’s tribute to the soldiers from the city who lost their lives during the First World War. Before that, it was a large area, part farmland and part woodland, that formed Styvechale Common. It consists of two areas, the formal gardens with the War Memorial, and also the sports areas, with playing fields, footgolf course, Splash ‘n’ Play Park and play areas. All around the park are memorials, large and small, formal and informal, from the huge War Memorial itself to tiny plaques, half hidden by tree roots, but they don’t dominate, they are extra objects of interest to be seen.
Having parked at the ‘sports area’ end of the park (2 hours free parking), we set off into the park. Crikey, the park was busy! So many people! Our first two caches were hidden among the hedges and trees that screen the park from the main road. It was much quieter among the trees, but also much wetter underfoot – it has rained a great deal recently!
Back on the paved paths, it was drier. We made our way towards our next cache, and were about to turn the final corner when we spotted two people looking intently at an object a little way away. Hmm, we thought, there is only one kind of person that is quite so interested in such an ordinary spot … geocachers … so we went up to greet them. It’s always good to meet other cachers out in the field.
mason5578 and m8foteme
We continued into the more formal part of the park, finding more caches, passing the huge war memorial, flowerbeds, the rockery (a shallow water feature, given the recent rain!), and arriving to look for our next cache by a small pond. Oops … we’d walked into a photoshoot! Lights, reflectors, photographers … and a dapper young model in a bright purple outfit. And that meant no-one, no-one at all, was looking at us while we retrieved the cache a short distance away.
Purple!!!
Our free parking time was nearly over, so we returned to the car park via one more cache. It was called Alameda, which meant nothing much to us, so we wandered along a row of trees, wondering where to look. We spent a while checking … things … without success. Then I just happened to look at a certain object from a certain direction and noticed that it was pretending to be part of a tree, and was concealing something. Aha: our final cache! (Editor’s note: Alameda – (Spanish) a public walkway between rows of poplar trees.)
Then – back to the geocar for the long drive home …
Here are some of the geocaches we found (FYI – this is a very popular series):
The Basingtoke Canal is a 31 mile canal built in the late 1700s which links Basingstoke to the River Thames at Weybridge. Over the years we have walked a fair percentage of the towpath, and today we would add another 3-4 miles to that percentage, and at the same time find a few geocaches!
Like many canals it fell into disrepair after WWII, but following many years of restoration it is now navigable for much of its original length. The canal does suffer, from time to time, with limited water, so there are fewer boats than other canals.
We parked near the Canal Visitor Centre relatively early and the Centre was only just being opened, We crossed the canal on a swingbridge (restored and opened in 1999 by Councillor Jill White) and walked South.
We had a there-and back route planned as it is not easy building a circular walk away from the canal. To the East is a railway line, and then Army land. To the west is a ribbon development of towns, and then the busy dual-carriageway of the Blackwater Valley ByPass.
Our first find was opposite the Visitor Centre. We were grateful for being early, as much later the prying eyes of coffee-drinkers would have seen us lurking, suspiciously, behind an ivy covered tree and finding a cache.
Many of the finds were hidden in ivy, the branches of trees or in roots. The canal towpath had many trees and sometimes we searched 3 or 4 potential hosts before finding the cache. One one occasion, we didn’t find the cache, and agreed to have another search on our return. (one of the few advantages of a ‘there and back walk’.)
The towpath was averagely busy – sometimes we saw dog walkers, joggers, cyclists – other times we had the path to ourselves. Invariably we had the towpath to ourselves between caches, and the moment we started to search for a cache, someone would appear seemingly from nowhere.
One person we did chat to was a man from the Canal authority. He had been filling in a large pothole, and was waiting for his work to settle before moving onto another maintenance job. He had already left, when we returned about an hour after we had chatted to him.
Although the route was a ‘there and back’ we did add a cache or two cache away from the canal on both our outbound and return journeys. The first, near Ash station, was well hidden behind some trees. It took us some minutes, to scrape away some leaf litter to find the container. Another minor diversion took us to some photographs, taken during WWII, of work being undertaken on the canal.
The diversion on our return trip was to Mychett Place. Mychett Place is an Army base, but during WWII, it was known as Camp Z. Prisoners of War were kept there, including Rudolf Hess, following his transfer from the Tower of London. The cache was hidden within sight of the Army gates, but not so close to attract attention from the security guards.
Following this cache, and its chilling history, we returned to the canal, and the visitor centre. The picnic tables were now full of people enjoying the slightly chill, but sunny Spring day.. We had one more cache to attempt, to the North of our first cache of the day. We recrossed the swing bridge, chatting as we did so, with a canoeist preparing himself to paddle away. His preparation was so professional, we enquired whether he would be attempting the Devizes to Westminster canoe race being held the following weekend. He explained he wasn’t but he would be helping with the marshalling. We have seen the DW race twice, and he was impressed with our knowledge of it.
After all our chit-chat we then walked by the cache, and had to retrace our steps for our final find of the day.
A very pleasant walk, with some unexpected history thrown in too!
It was a busy Saturday morning, just leaving time for a brief caching trip between appointments. We parked the geocar in the almost-full car park at King George V recreation ground, got out and surveyed the scene. As you’d expect on a Saturday morning, the park was busy with children playing football (there were team talks, even for the tiny ones, after one match: we overheard “… you lost your focus in the last quarter of the game…” addressed to some 5 or 6 year olds!). And what of the park? It’s a great little place, not somewhere we’d been before: busy, space to play, space to park, memorials, statues, a sundial, and (this time of year) lots of daffodils too. (Editor’s note: we’re fond of parks as can be seen from many of our posts!)
Inhabitants of the park…… and park activities
Our first geocache was one from the Counting Vowels series. To find these, you visit several locations, and make a note of something written down – a house name/part of a sign/a maker’s plaque/etc – total up the vowels, and use these to derive the coordinates for the cache. We did just this, with a handy seat for us to sit and assemble the coordinates. Then off we went to the cache location, not too far away, and found a cache container made from natural materials, unobtrusive and in good condition even though we were the first to sign the log for some little while.
Just up the road from the park is a school with current royal connections. We admired from afar … then turned our attention to another cache, based on a house which has been converted from a chapel. The description offered two methods for working out the coordinates, one based upon a date on the front of the house/chapel, and the other based on a phone number on a nearby notice. We worked out the coordinates using both methods and got the same results (phew!). Then it was off towards the final location, along a track punctuated by giant puddles. As we got closer, there was a choice of paths … so we chose the wrong one (typical!) and had to backtrack, finally arriving, muddily, at the correct place. On our return, dodging those mighty puddles again, we met two campaigners for a religious organisation, gingerly tiptoeing round the ‘lakes’. We pointed to the larger ‘lakes’ ahead and suggested they might not wish to go further!
We had time for just one more cache, a nice easy one located at a post box, it’s part of the Post Post series. Sure enough, we soon found the cache container magnetically attached to an unobtrusive part of the box. The religious canvassers didn’t notice us …
During our walk around Lynchmere, we discovered a trackable, Thor’s Holiday Tree 2.
Thor’s Holiday Tree 2
A plastic, scary, Nordic face connected to a fir tree.
The trackable was released in early 2020 into a cache in San Francisco on the Western side of America. During 2020, surprisingly given that the pandemic limited geocacher’s movements, the trackable moved a fair few miles. Firstly North to just shy of the Canadian border, and then relatively soon after, South to just shy of the Mexican border. The full sweep of mainland America – North to South!
The trackable then headed East, as far as the to city of Erie in Pennsylvania on the edge of Lake Erie (close to the Canadian border again) before returning to the Chicago area before heading to the UK.
It arrived in the UK in August 2023, where it visited the Jurassic Coast before being placed in the Lynchmere cache.
The owner of Thor’s Holiday Tree 2, also owns another 160+ trackables. We are not sure how many of these have been lost over the years, but the twin of this trackable, Thor’s Holiday Tree, is also still moving…but as yet hasn’t left America!
Despite owning a GPS for geocaching, we do not own a satnav.
Whenever we go somewhere new, we (generally Mrs Hg137) surveys google-maps, pores over routes, and even takes the google-map-man on a virtual journey so we understand every nuance of the forthcoming journey.
We had the route to Lynchmere committed to memory … as we approached we would arrive at a T-junction, turn left, then right, and shortly after, left again. Easy.
Until when we arrived at the T-junction in the car, we turned right not left.
We realised our error straightaway, but the road was narrow, with infrequent passing places, and nowhere to undertake a 3-point turn! We drove on, cursing, eventually finding ourselves parallel to the A3. We stopped, devised a route avoiding the narrow road, entered the town of Liphook , and promptly took 2 more wrong turnings !
So it was 30 minutes after we planned to arrive, in the small hamlet of Lynchmere absolutely shattered.
The Caching route
Lynchmere (or Linchmere on some maps) is a small village just inside the Sussex border. Apparently it has over 800 houses, but we barely saw more than 10. We did see a dilapidated bus-shelter, which after our ‘awkward’ journey was an ideal place to sit, and drink a calming cup of coffee.
Refreshed we were ready to start the route. There were 11 Caches to find, and a bonus too. Normally the bonus co-ordinate numbers would be simply stated in various caches on route, however in this series, we had a mini quiz to solve! Many of the caches were hidden in or near trees, and the cache owner asked us a multiple choice question…what is the tree ?
We are fairly good at many trees, although we sometimes get our larch, birch, beech mixed up if we can’t see the leaves. Differentiating between different sub-species we have trouble too – is it an English Oak or Sessile Oak ? Armed with a reference book, and our knowledge we found the tree quizzes relatively straightforward as we frequently had to pick between Oak, Willow or Pine! There was one question we didn’t know but we noted all the possible answers to the question, to help us later.
A typical cache, and question
We started climbing away from the bus stop, up a track becoming muddier and muddier as we climbed. After finding the first couple of caches, we discovered why the path was so muddy, there was a natural spring line two-thirds the distance up the hill. The winter rain was trickling down the to the bottom part of the path, but the top section was ‘relatively’ dry.
The first few caches were straightforward finds, but one was particularly hard – hidden in tree roots. There was a line of trees all with exposed hidey-hole root systems. It took us some time to check all the rootholes out. As we did so, a lady, a small child and a Shetland pony passed us, heading for the mud – we warned them of it, and a few minutes later they returned having heeded our advice.
Lots of hiding places in those roots
At the top of the hill, we should have had a great view of the South Downs, but the hill was planted with trees in all directions (great for caches, poor for views). We only got a brief hazy look at the South Downs ridge 15 miles to the South.
In the distance, just, is the South Downs
About one third of the way down, we reached the spring line again, and the path once again become very slippery. There was a cache hidden a few yards into the mud, and we had the foresight to search for this, before our sticky, slippery descent. We arrived unexpectedly at the outer edges of Lynchmere – an expensive house with a tennis court, a large ornamental pond – and a small estate of about 6 houses. No caches here, but after crossing a couple of roads the footpath followed a wide stream. A fallen tree straddled the stream and a cache was nearby. We really didn’t want to wade across the stream, or indeed use the tree as a bridge, so we checked the previous finders’ logs. They all indicated we didn’t need to cross the stream ! Phew!
But we did have to get quite close to the stream edge to start searching. After a short while, and after a minute or two longer in the stream periphery than Mr Hg137 would have liked he found the cache!
We had one more cache to find (besides the bonus) and we had yet to have lunch. Just as we had resigned ourselves to finishing the circuit famished, we found a dryish bank, around some tree roots. An excellent spot which enabled adequate refreshment to be partaken before the rigour of the final cache.
This was set someway from the path (indeed we originally walked beyond the slight track leading to the cache). But then the path suddenly descended down a very steep slope, to a another fallen tree. The cache was hidden in one of the myriad of holes formed by the broken roots. Mrs Hg137 logged onto the internet to ascertain any pictures or clues to help the search. Mr Hg137 cautiously climbed downhill. He arrived and started checking the roots. Some great places, but no cache. Mrs Hg137 was still struggling to get an internet signal, as Mr Hg137 crossed a tiny stream, and searched again. Eventually the cache was found, and as it turned out, just visible from the lofty position Mrs Hg137 was standing in! Grr!
There’s a cache there – really ? ! Can we have a cache here please ?
We had 10 out of the 11 bonus numbers, and a couple of candidates for the 11th. We generated a couple of candidate coordinates for the bonus cache and put them into our GPS. We discovered, as we thought, the hiding place would be close (ish) to our car. A long hedge ran alongside a grassy field. Plenty of places to search, and it took us some time, as, remember, we were speculating on one of the numbers. Then after about 20 minutes searching, we saw the container. The next problem was removing the lid. The container was a metal jar and the lid had rusted on. We couldn’t turn it at all. So Mrs Hg137 located her trusty penknife, and with one of the copious blades, gingerly ran the knife around the lid. A few seconds later we heard a ‘sigh’ as air left the pot, and seconds later we were signing the log! A tricky end to a great series.
The bonus cache – but how do we get the lid open ?
We had one more Lynchmere cache to find, a church micro. We walked from the car to the church, collected numbers from various graves. (Apparently the broadcaster Richard Dimbleby is buried in the churchyard, but we never found his grave). We paused for coffee – graveyards are great for seats, before returning, towards the car to find the cache after a shortish search.
St Peter’s, Lynchmere
So a great day’s caching after a tricky navigational start, all we had to do was find the correct road out of the village to get home!
sandhurstgeocachers 