February 26 : Basingstoke

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

We’d decided on a morning’s geocaching in Basingstoke, a place we’ve rarely visited; and so we found ourselves in War Memorial Park. Even on a chilly weekday morning, the park was busy with joggers, lots of dog walkers and folk out braving the cold air and fresh breeze.   The park contains football pitches, a skate park, a play area, an aviary and lots of open space.  At 9am on Saturday there is a parkrun and can get very busy (anywhere that hosts a parkrun gets very busy at 9am on Saturdays!). We planned to find a mixture of physical caches, some in the park, some nearby, and an AdLab cache, too, which would mostly take us around the park.  (FYI:  AdLabs require you to visit several locations and answer a question at each.)

Our initial action was to collect the first stage of a multicache – this gave us coordinates for the second, and final stage, which we’d complete later as our last cache of the morning; some cachers think this stage is actually the final, and sign the coordinate sheet – we didn’t check how many then move on to the other location!

Now, on to the Adlab.   We reached one of 6 stone plaques set into the path: this one contains a quote from Ode to Evening by William Collins. A bit further on, we came to an aviary containing cockatiels and budgies, all chirping away merrily.   They all seemed warm and happy, but the cold was seeping in and our fingers and toes were a bit numb.

All Saints Church, Basingstoke

We emerged into the streets by the park and made our way to our next geocache, a Church Micro cache at Basingstoke All Saints, an imposing building about a hundred years old; the original tin church was moved around the corner and is now the church hall.    Having worked out the coordinates to the cache, we scooted off to find it, then huddled in the church porch, out of the howling north wind, for a warming cup of coffee.

Marginally warmer, we moved on to the Top of the Town, the old town centre, before Basingstoke expanded in the 1960s.    The pedestrianised street widened into the Market Place, close to the museum and complete with an almost life-size statue of Jane Austen; or maybe she was very small?  Further on, we left the car-free area and reached the northern entrance to the park.   Here stands the War Memorial that gives its name to the park.

Once there, we looked for – and failed to find – a couple of caches in the shrubbery; we felt we’d failed at the time, but neither has been found since, and one has been archived; so it wasn’t just us, they simply weren’t there!   And finally, we completed that cache we had started right back at the beginning of the morning.  The GPS led us on a merry spiral, and we gradually moved inwards – we were pleased when the centre of our spiral was where the cache was located, nice and dry.   And that completed our caching; we’d intended to stay longer, and find more caches, but we’d got really, really cold, and drove home to warm up.

And what did we think of Basingstoke – the bit of it we’d walked through?   The park was great, and clearly appreciated by the many people using it, even on a cold, grey day.    And, having always thought of Basingstoke as a ‘new’ town, the Top of the Town, and the area around, showed us a side of the town we’d not realised was there.   An interesting morning – but COLD!

February 24 : South Hill Park : Ad Lab

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

South Hill Park, Bracknell

Just a quick, local geocaching trip today – to South Hill Park, on the southern edge of Bracknell, for a walk around the park and an attempt at an AdLab cache. 

South Hill Park is a large, attractive historic park, open to the public every day of the year.  It has landscaped gardens, woodland, and two large lakes, surrounding a Grade II listed mansion which contains two theatres, a cinema, art studios and galleries, plus a café/restaurant.

We’ve walked round the grounds many a time, especially during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, when we sometimes used it for our ‘permitted exercise’ after food shopping at the nearby superstore; it was a different place to visit, and most welcome for that reason.  But we hadn’t been there all that often since.

The Rings of Pachamama

We set off along the path by the North Lake, in front of the mansion.   Part way along, we came to some large white concrete rings, some partially embedded in the ground.   I’ve always assumed they were seating, or something for fitness exercises – nope, I was wrong – they are a sculpture, the Rings of Pachamama , specially made for South Hill Park by sculptor Lucy Strachan. 

We turned onto a boardwalk which runs across a wetland area through reed beds and ponds.  Spring growth was getting under way and we saw lots of frogspawn! 

Chasing Pokemon …

Passing a lovely bank of miniature daffodils – and several groups of Pokemon chasers, staring at their phones – we followed the path round the narrower, tree-lined South Lake, on the other side of the mansion.   

Crossing the bridge half-way along the lake, we walked through woodland, back towards the house.   There’s an amphitheatre here, we’ve been to several outdoor theatrical events here on past summer evenings, some traditional theatre, some more ‘experimental’.

Entering the formal gardens, we descended the steps into the Italian Garden, all neat, clipped hedges and formal planting, then out along the terrace.   And that completed our AdLab – and our tour of the grounds, too.   As so often with geocaching, we’d learnt new things about a familiar place …

January 13 : (Return to) Wokingham

Just five days previously we had visited Wokingham in perishingly cold weather and undertook an ad lab in Wokingham Town Centre.

Simultaneously, we tried to undertake two multi-caches which shared much of the ad lab’s route.

A combination of the cold, confusion over which cache we were doing, and the pressure to return to our car before our car parking charge ran out -left us annoyed and frustrated.

Mr Hg137 knew the Town Centre well – he’d lived in the town for 30+ years, Mrs Hg137 had a reasonable knowledge too. And we still messed up.

We decided once the temperature rose (admittedly it was only a degree or two), and some improved planning of a walking route we would return.

So five days later, we started again on the two multi-caches.

One of the two multis took us on a glorified pub crawl around the Town Centre. Wokingham was once famed for having the most pubs per head of population. Sadly a combination of Wokingham’s population growth and the economic downturn of pubs, has meant this title has been lost.

 Our caching walk took us to several pubs that remain and at each pub, we had to gather numbers from either a feature of the pub itself, or a nearby piece of street furniture.

Simultaneously we followed a trail of blue plaques. The ad lab we had completed visited 5 blue plaque locations, but the multi took us to many more. Indeed the cache owner didn’t let on that the waypoints were at ‘blue plaques’ as he referred to them as ‘Wotsits’ in the cache description. What made this multi harder, was that at every plaque/waypoint we had to find a number, and use that as a basis for the coordinates for the next plaque/waypoint. We had to take great care on checking every number we found, as we didn’t to miss a blue plaque.

In the end we collected a variety of numbers for both the pubs and plaques, calculated coordinates and found both ‘final’ caches. One was hidden in a set-back location, the other in a high visibility location within a car park.

As well as a pub crawl, and a blue plaque trail, Wokingham has a ‘mosaic’ trail with mosaic laid into the pavements. We are quite sure, that in that not-to-distant future, these mosaics may well form an opportunity for another caching trail in Wokingham.

Our only disappointment of the morning was spending 15 minutes looking for a standard cache in one of Wokingham’s Parks. Sadly for us, the cache has disappeared and we registered a did-not-find. It sort of summed up the last few days in Wokingham – hard work, for very little gain.

January 8 : Wokingham’s blue plaques

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Wokingham Town Hall

Wokingham has many interesting old buildings dotted about the town centre.  Many are marked by blue plaques, which have their very own Blue Plaque Trail.  For the geocacher, the information on the plaques lends itself for setting multicaches and Adlab caches – those where numbers need to be found, or things are to be counted, to use to calculate coordinates.

On a bleak day in early January, we set off around Wokingham to find some of those caches.  Our initial plan was to look for two multicaches plus an Adlab and its associated bonus (physical) cache, since all were based around similar locations and some of the same blue plaques.   It didn’t go at all well; doing three caches at once, we got mixed up, then found one of the stages in one multicache had a problem: the clue item was damaged.  In the end, we said – finish the ad lab and go home and get warm.  And that’s what we did.

It all got easier once we were doing one thing, not three, and weren’t struggling to enter coordinates into the GPS with freezing fingers.    (FYI: AdLab caches work from a mobile phone and rely on proximity to the clue locations.)

The Tudor House, Wokingham

We started at the Tudor House, once a 16^th century mansion; more recently, it was a doctor’s surgery: Mr Hg137 remembers it well from his days as a Wokingham resident.   Walking along Broad Street, we stopped at Nationwide Building Society.   This has a blue plaque, not for its current use, but for a previous incarnation as a cinema, the first in Wokingham.

A short way on is Wokingham Town Hall, a place where we’ve both attended special things: weddings, funeral wakes, Mayor Making ceremonies and much else.   Today we weren’t going inside, just inspecting the blue plaque and the water trough nearby (it’s now a planter).  

Leaving the Town Hall, we turned into Rose Street, wide and lined with historic buildings.  Another blue plaque awaited us near the far end, on a (small) residential house; this used to be a school with 12 pupils and a live-in teacher – it must have been quite crowded!

Just around the corner was the last blue plaque on our trail, placed to show off The Overhangs, some of Wokingham’s oldest buildings, which really do overhang one of the main roads through the town centre.   Once again, the location had memories for Mr Hg137, as he used to work there in the mid-1990s (he tells me it’s modernised inside, it’s just the façade that retains the Tudor layout).     

We sheltered from the wind and worked out the coordinates of the bonus geocache.   Our GPS gave us a direction to travel in, and we knew how far away it was in a straight line from us, but we didn’t know exactly where it was.   So we followed a not-so-straight line along paths, probably not the quickest way, through car parks, and along roads, to arrive at … a place near where a postman had chained his trolley!   Oops, we didn’t want to attract attention by rummaging there!    But all was well: a glance behind a nearby object showed us the cache, tucked away out of direct sight.   Time was pressing now, our parking time was running out, and it was a speedy walk back to the geocar, and home for a warming cup of tea.

Found it!

November 24 : Kingsclere village

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

St Mary’s, Kingsclere

Kingsclere : as described by a local resident and fellow geocacher, TadleyTrailblazers:  

Kingsclere has a Post Office, three pubs, two local stores, a library, hairdresser, butchers, and art gallery, everything a small community could want in this north Hampshire village.  A bustling parish with strong community ties and a unique, friendly atmosphere, Kingsclere is a fantastic place to sample the surrounding views and neighbouring villages. This area inspired the novelist Richard Adams to create the world-famous story of Watership Down.  ‘Clere’ is thought to have derived from the Saxon and may possibly mean ‘bright’ or ‘clearing’; there is evidence to suggest that Kingsclere belonged to King Alfred between the years of 872 to 888 with the full name being referenced in a chart.

We began our visit to the village with an AdLab cache, which gave us a guided tour of the highlights of the older part of the village.   We inspected the Old House (once an impressive solicitor’s office), then, closer to the village centre, two locations linked with brewing, the Malt House, and Popes Mill, and two more associated with drinking, the Golden Falcon and the Crown Inn (all, except the last, are now private houses).

A few doors from the pub was a Methodist chapel, and opposite was the village church, St Mary’s.   Crossing the road, we passed toilets, a coffee shop, a convenience store and the local butchers, then went into the churchyard, musing to ourselves that almost all of our spiritual and physical needs were provided for in this small area!    Our thoughts were interrupted as it began to rain, hard and cold – this hadn’t been in the weather forecast!   We took refuge in the church, had a warming cup of coffee, then headed outside again, where it was no longer raining, but noticeably colder.

A short walk took us past yet another, now unused church, so now we had coordinates for three Church Micro caches to find later on. Next we followed a track uphill to the Recreation Ground, which has a hilltop view over the village, and towards Watership Down in the other direction.  After finding two geocaches around the edges of the field, we descended a steep flight of steps to Hollowshot Lane, a straight track running roughly east-west.   We had quickly gone from village to countryside, and the sunshine was returning.

Here we had a dilemma:  a geoache lay some hundreds of yards away to the east, off our route, so an out-and-back diversion would be needed.  AND – said cache hadn’t been found for 5 months, so we could have a long detour for something that was no longer there.  After consideration, we decided to try to find it anyway.  Once there, we spent some while peering around fruitlessly, then leant on a nearby gate to read previous logs … looking down … we spotted something lying out in the open.  Aha!  Found it at last.  That made the return trip much happier.

Park House Stables gallops

Reaching the road at the end of the track, we made our way back towards the village.  We had more detours and diversions to make, this time to look for the cache containers associated with those churches we had passed earlier.   In no particular order – one was along a woodland path, one tucked into a concrete post, and the third was in a delightful spot along a stream running through the village.

Park House Stables and their immaculate gallops lay to our left – no racehorses visible today: wrong time of year, wrong time of day.  

Our walk concluded along the same clear chalk stream. The rain was gone now, and we finished the day in clear, cold sunshine.

PS And the butchers , which we passed earlier … we went back, went in and bought some lovely venison sausages.  Not cheap, but delicious!

Here are some of the caches we found:

November 17 : Yateley Lakes (part 2)

The rain had subsided. The roads were less flooded. It seemed a good day to complete the Yateley Lakes series that we had started 4 days previously.

We had 3 Yateley Lakes caches to find, a couple of stages from a 5-stage ad lab, and one other cache part of the 50+ cache Drive By series. We could have driven to this cache ourselves, but it was only a short walk from one of the Yateley Lake caches, so we decided to include it in our morning’s walk.

We parked the car in an almost identical spot to our previous visit, and Mrs Hg137 set about getting the ad lab started on her phone. For some inexplicable reason the ad lab wouldn’t load, so she resorted to the standard IT maxim ‘ turn it off, and on again’. While this process was happening, we took the liberty of locating a Yateley Lake cache positioned just outside the car park.  We stood where there had been 2-3 inches of water a few days ago and picked up various items. Remembering that the caches were set by VR7, the cache could have been anything – and eventually we realised we had the cache container in our hand, more by luck than skilful searching.

We hastily replaced the cache, as a car swung by us, and drove into the car park.

By now Mrs Hg137’s phone had come alive, and the ad lab application was good-to-go. As we walked back into the car park, and neared the ad lab question location, the driver of the car shouted at us “I know what you are doing!”. Yikes !  We had been rumbled!

But no, it was another geocacher, fennyflip, awaiting a friend, who he was going to introduce to geocaching. We chatted awhile, until his friend arrived. They set off following the lake one direction, and we left in the other. We admired the ‘watersports’ section of the lake – no foolhardy watersports enthusiasts today – and completed our final ad lab stage, and headed for our penultimate Yateley Lakes cache.

This one was hidden near a footpath crossroads, and it was quite busy. We initially searched the wrong side of the footpath, and paused for several minutes while various dog-walkers went by. After a few minutes we spotted a likely hiding place which required us to undertake some determined effort to release the cache. Our determination couldn’t have been that great, as we failed to release the cache, and we assumed our thoughts were wrong. After a few more minutes fruitless searching, we re-tried the hiding place, and this time we were successful. Log signed, we headed off, uphill, to the ‘Drive By’ cache..

Our route took us away from the semi-gravel track around the lake, to a grassy slope. After the rain, the grass was muddy, and there occasional ‘marshy’ sections we had to walk around. We passed a couple of people on the way up the slope, and we exchanged pleasantries and swapped advice on how to avoid the mud!We arrived at a road – quite handy as we were looking for a Drive By cache, and spotted a tree, the host, a few yards away. However as we made our way to the tree, a gentleman with a dog came out of the adjacent cottage. We stared at us suspiciously. We decided to feign a navigational error, paused, consulted phones and maps and walked the other way – all the time being watched by the gentleman and his dog. He walked away, and after a while, we saw the gentleman disappearing round a bend in the road, giving us a ideal opportunity to grab the simple cache.

We walked back down the muddy slope, this time aware of all the muddy sections, and found a simple footpath to our final Yateley Lakes cache. Again a sneaky hide, but visible in plain sight.

It was a shame we broke the series into two trips, but given the volumes of water still lying close to the footpaths, we knew we would have got very wet had we continued on our first visit.

If you want to find some clever hides, hidden in tranquil scenery, do attempt the Yateley Lakes – but do visit when the weather is dry!

November 13 : Yateley Lakes

A new-ish series had been placed around Yateley Lakes. This is an area we have walked and cached several times. It seems a popular place for a cache owner to place a few caches, leave them in place for a couple of years and then remove them, allowing the space for other caches to be placed.

We had previously found two of the Yateley Lakes caches in 2018 and 2021, but now there were another 10 to find.

The River Blackwater runs parallel to the Lakes, and perhaps it was not a good idea to undertake a series so close to a river and lakes the day after 2/3 of an inch had fallen. Hindsight is wonderful.

Alarm bells started to ring as we drove to the car park near cache 1. Farmers’ fields were awash and the water was flowing from the fields across the road. As we approached the car park we saw a sign saying it would closed the following day, but it was padlocked shut today as well.

One of the drier road sections!

We had one other alternative, to drive back through the flooded roads, to another car park. This one was closer to cache 12.  As we approached the car park the roads were even wetter as  roadside ditches had overspilled their banks. We also noted that 3 caches we were due to find were along this flooded section.

We decided to start the route, and would abandon if the riverside paths were too submerged. We also decided to miss the caches near the flooded road section.

The caches were set by local cachers VR7, who are frequently devious in their choice of containers and hiding place. Given that Yateley Laeks is a popular area for walking, this is no bad thing – it just meant we wouldn’t have any ‘quick finds’. We also had a 5 stage ad lab to complete, though we noted a couple of the sections were closer to the flooded road, so again we decided to move these stages to a subsequent visit.

View from inside a bird hide

Surprisingly the paths around the Lakes were easy to walk around. A couple of large puddles here and there, and one very long muddy section where we had to navigate by and avoid the nearby barbed wire. Otherwise our sturdy walking boots were ideal. 

As we expected the caches were ‘devious’. Sometimes the hints were misleading – “I’m next to a Multi-Trunked Tree” was one such hint. The GPS led us to a large tree where the cache would have been placed by most other owners. VR7 had put the cache next to a much, much smaller tree about a yard away! We spend ages here as we did at several other caches.

The ad lab stages were far simpler, a quick question – sometimes involving counting, other times noting names from a memorial bench.

Lots of information boards – useful for ad lab stages

Soon we were approaching the lowered numbered caches and we saw a couple walking towards us. They had parked in the car park which we thought was locked. It was, but it is generally unlocked from 930… we were there at 920! The approach to the car park from the River Blackwater is along a footpath on one side, a hedge in the middle, and a bridleway on the other. The caches we had to find were invariably on the wrong side of the hedge, so some backtracking was needed.

We were surprised to see a birdbox close to cache 1, and assumed this to be the cache. It wasn’t and a bird flew away as we approached. We are sure many other cachers would make the same mistake, and the cache owner has changed the hint, so that the birdbox is ignored. 

Sadly the route is not totally circular –  and we headed back to cache 12 taking one diversion to cache 7 (the easiest cache of the day) situated partway between 2 lakes.

With hindsight we could have completed the series, but we had mentally said ‘park the rest for when the conditions are drier’, so we drove back, through the slightly dropping water levels back home.

Yateley Lakes – we will be back!

November 11 : The Strong of Sandhurst

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

After a very wet few weeks, a countryside geocaching trip was not really an option (way too muddy!). As an alternative, to find a 5-stage Adventure Lab (AdLab) cache based around Sandhurst Memorial Park and Shepherd Meadows.  We hoped we would stay dry!

How AdLab caches work:
Using your mobile as a GPS, you find your way to various locations, then answer a question which your phone reveals once you are there.   After visiting all the locations, that completes the AdLab cache.  It’s similar to a multicache, which offers up clues and numbers at each stage.   But … why can’t you cheat?   And find out the information without being there?   Well, the question isn’t unlocked until you are very close indeed to each location, and they are usually about things only visible once standing on the spot.

Shepherd Meadows and Sandhurst Memorial Park cover 68 hectares (169 acres) of wet meadows (not too wet, we hoped!), woodland and recreational green spaces.  We decided to start the AdLab in the Memorial Park, then work our way into Shepherd Meadows, and along the River Blackwater.

Sandhurst War Memorial

Our first stop was the War Memorial, where we needed to answer our first question.   Today was Remembrance Day, and all was tidy and quiet.   It would be much, much busier the next day, Sunday, when the Remembrance service would take place.  As Sandhurst is the home of the Royal Military Academy, this event is always well arranged and well attended.

Heave-ho! Tug of War practice weights

Passing the Community Hall, we walked on, very gently downhill, along the side of some of the football pitches, heading for the area where Sandhurst Tug of War team practice.  The team have been 3 times World Champions, 2 times European Champions and 8 times National Champions!   We needed to look at the structure used by the team for training, a metal tower with very heavy weights attached.     The uphill end of the fields had been … damp, while the downhill end, nearer the river, was … boggy.   We both kept our feet dry, but only just.

Bracknell Town FC, Bottom Meadow

We were right next to the shared ground of Sandhurst Town and Bracknell Town football clubs.   They play at the aptly named Bottom Meadow; a match was in progress, and, from the shouts, Bracknell were doing well; we later learned that they beat Chesham United 4-0.  Well done to the Robins!

We moved on to the Balancing pond, a small lake used for the temporary storage of excess storm water after periods of heavy rainfall.   It was doing its job today, as the path round one side of the pond was underwater.   We needed to look at something near the pond for our next location – hmm, it was just visible without paddling; once again, our feet just stayed dry.

From here, we walked out into Shepherd Meadows, crossing the River Blackwater and walking along the Hampshire side of the river (the river is the Berkshire/Hampshire county boundary).

We had one more structure to inspect along the riverbank, then it was out to the main road to inspect the Sandhurst Millennium sign, just as the daylight began to fade.   Job done, AdLab completed, and a not too wet walk across a variety of terrain.

September 30 : The Ridgeway : Coombe Hill to Wigginton

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Coombe Hill

Our weekend trip to the Chilterns to finish walking the Ridgeway didn’t start well.   We had a 9:30 appointment, waited through a motorway traffic jam, drove round a diversion caused by the HS2 railway construction works, and didn’t start walking till about 11:30, much, much later than usual.   And the days are shortening fast at this time of year …

We retraced our steps to where we’d finished the previous walk, just short of Coombe Hill, and set off along the steep ridge overlooking the Vale of Aylesbury.   Very soon, it was time for the first geocache of the day, View from Coombe Hill.   We’d found this cache before in September 2012, on our very first ever day’s caching.   So – we’d already found it – why visit again?  It’s the oldest surviving cache in England, placed in January 2001, and has been logged almost 3000 times (and we didn’t realise this when we visited before).  It seemed only fitting to revisit it and pay our respects.

England’s oldest geocache

The cache is part way down a very steep slope.  We scrambled down; a family was walking along a path lower down the hill; we waited for them to go by … they didn’t, but instead began climbing the slope … we were heading for the same place.   We met up at the cache and swapped trackables and stories with them; nice to meet you, GeoHunter170, and we hope the cache lasts for many more years.

HS2 under construction

It’s not far from the geocache to the monument at Coombe Hill, with tremendous views all the way.   We spent far too long here, taking pictures, admiring the view, doing other caches, and having lunch.  Finally we set off down the long ridge which led to Wendover, which lies in a gap in the Chiltern ridge.   From this direction the view has changed, not necessarily for the better.  HS2 is being built across the valley with a massive, motorway-style construction site across our route.   It definitely wasn’t like this when we were here before!

Wendover

We walked through Wendover town centre and turned onto a path beside a stream which led to the church.   The church was busy, bellringing practice was under way, so we wandered round the churchyard, listening to the bells and collecting coordinates for a Church Micro cache.  Having worked out the location, we decided it was too far off route: it was now mid-afternoon and we were well behind time.  Once out of town, we climbed up a very steep hill, through Wendover Woods and back onto the ridge.    We threaded our way across woods and fields – sadly,  the earlier views were missing – making our way towards the end of the day’s walk at Wigginton.   There weren’t many caches along here, and we couldn’t find a single one that we searched for, not one.    Each unsuccessful search took up time: if a cache is found quickly, you can move on quickly, but there is always the temptation to keep looking, keep looking, keep looking if a cache can’t be found.    It was now early evening and the light levels were dropping fast.

Having started late, we were now even further behind time; today had NOT gone to plan.  As we approached Tring Park, dusk was upon us.   We had a choice: a longer walk through the park, likely missing any caches in the gloom, arrive back at the car in the dark, and still have a drive back to get the car at the start point: or we could take a short cut back to Wigginton along a nice straight track (once part of the Ridgeway, now re-routed) and hope to finish a bit earlier.    We debated … then chose the short cut … ho hum, we’d have a longer walk the next day.

Reaching the end:  now back to our start point to collect the other car, via the several-mile-diversion round the HS2 works.  We had another problem: We’d booked an evening meal at our hotel and there was no way we would get there in time.   A fraught journey back in the dark, along narrow, unfamiliar roads (including a diversion to the hotel to rearrange the meal), and through roadworks, and we arrived back at Coombe Hill car park in complete darkness.  We finally reached our hotel two-and-a-half-hours later than planned, in total darkness, with 15 minutes to go to our meal, and scraped into the restaurant in a state of dishevelment. All in all: a day that started badly and didn’t get better!

The end of a looong day!

August 14 : Bracknell : Geocachers visit the library

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Geocachers visit the library

It was a damp Monday morning, and we were off to Bracknell for a miscellany of geocaching.   The main purpose of the visit was to attend a geocacher’s meet, described below:

… “This meet will be inside Bracknell Library, at the invitation of the Librarian.
We know that cachers are so enthusiastic about their hobby, and are always happy to talk to those who have not yet seen the light, and perhaps convert them.  This will be your ideal opportunity, for although this is a proper geocaching meet, the librarian also intends to attract to the library at that time those who are not yet cachers, but who might be interested.  In addition to chatting about the basics of geocaching, you may wish to recall some favourite caches, either ones that you may have placed, or found.   So, talk away – on this occasion you will be able to do so inside a library. “…

And nearby was a multicache or two (that’s a geocache with two or more stages), an AdLab (a virtual tour using a phone), and the word was that a couple of new caches would be released nearby to coincide with the event.

That sounded like enough to keep us busy for a couple of hours, so we set off for Bracknell, parked the geocar, and set off for our first (multi)cache.   Its starting point was the ancient milestone outside Blue’s Smokehouse; soon assembled coordinates led to our first cache.   Blues was also the start of our AdLab cache, ‘Bygone Bracknell Watering Holes’, as the restaurant used to be the Red Lion pub before it turned blue.   We made our way through the town, visiting other past places of refreshment – the Bull Inn (still a pub, still the same name), Prospect estate agents (once Gingers, a deli), the Old Manor (now a pub, once a manor house), and the Market Tavern (still a pub, but which has had many names). 

Blues Smokehouse aka the Red Lion

The Old Manor

The Bull

The Market Tavern

Prospect aka Gingers

After that tour of some of the older bits of Bracknell – and there were many, many more ‘old’ bits and pieces in a town centre that I’ve always thought of as wholly modern – we set off for the library and the meet.   Other people, some we recognised, some carrying ill-concealed GPSs, were converging on the building – aha, other geocachers!  Inside, we met, and talked, and saw possible future geocachers being informed on how it all works.  We heard talk of the caches that were about to be released, with much staring at phones; then we spotted a lone geocacher exiting the library at speed.  We followed: or rather, Mr Hg137 hared off in pursuit, while I followed at a more sedate/sensible/’as quick as I could’ speed; as long as one or both were view it would be fine.    I caught up with them both in the middle of what is still called the Met Office roundabout, though the weather folk have long since moved to Exeter.   

The brand new geocache we were seeking is named ‘Thinking of Days Gone Bye’, and, sure enough, Mr Hg137 was reminiscing as he and GilDean (the other cacher) claimed a joint First to Find (FTF).  Mr Hg137 knew this bit of Bracknell very well indeed; he used to work at International Stores – the building there now is Avis. And he played Scrabble nearby when East Berks Scrabble Club met at the nearby Met Office building, now demolished.
(Editor’s note: the first geocacher to find a cache after it has been published gets First To Find and the chance to sign an empty log.  Some cachers set great store by this and many a cache is found within minutes of being published, day or night.)

First To Find

Finally, another multicache, another tour of central Bracknell, this time mostly around the Lexicon shopping centre, which was opened a few years ago.  We gathered the coordinates, which confirmed that we need to return to the library – one clue was in the cache name, ‘Quiet Please!’ – another was that the description states that the cache is only available during library opening hours – and a third was that I’d spied on the activities of other cachers in the library during the meet (much sneaking off to one particular area!), so I knew roughly where to look.  Sure enough, we returned to the library and soon found the cache tucked among the books.

The Lexicon

By now, it was nearly lunchtime; time to stop.  It had been a varied morning, with many parts of central Bracknell that I’d not visited before.  Interesting to see how many bits of ‘old’ Bracknell survive among the modern buildings!