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 …

February 16 : Elvetham Heath, Fleet

Elvetham Heath is a relatively new housing estate to the North West of Fleet. It comprises about 2000 dwellings with building work starting in 1999 and it was completed just 10 years later. To the north of the estate is the M3, to the south the main railway line to London. Despite these apparent ‘noisy neighbours’ Elvetham Heath is very pleasant, and surprisingly quiet.

In the centre of the estate is a supermarket, a village hall, a school, a church, a pub and many other facilities needed to support its 5000+ population.

The central car park is free for a limited time, but we thought (and we were right), our caching trip would be longer than the free car parking would permit, so we parked some distance from the centre in a residential road.

We planned on locating a cache on our way to the estate’s centre, attempt the multicaches set near the middle and return by visiting a few more caches.

The first cache we attempted was a puzzle cache based on the TV series ‘Death in Paradise’.  We thoroughly enjoy this series, but as it turned out the puzzle didn’t require expert knowledge of the show. A swift google search, some straightforward calculations and the final coordinates were discovered. The cache was hidden on a long, straight track running parallel to the railway.

The cache was a well crafted ‘bird-box’ container hidden just behind rhododendron bushes.

The path was surprisingly empty, we only saw a couple of dog walkers on our 10-15 minute walk to the village centre. We emerged from the quiet, tree-covered path to face the main centre. The supermarket car park was busy, people were crossing roads on errands… the quietness we had experienced had melted into a hubbub of people!

We had two multi-caches to find. We decided to collect the information for both caches, and then plan an optimal route to find the containers.

The first multi-cache entitled ‘My First Multi-cache’ required us to write down numbers from a parking restriction sign. The second multicache, part of the village hall series, required us to use digits from a phone number.

Both caches were in opposite directions! Before we set off to find the first cache, we found a simple cache close to the telephone box and post box – part of the Fine Pair Series. We first found a Fine Pair cache back in 2013 – that cache was number 64 in the National series – this cache was number 1435.

Interestingly the post box was an old George VI post box, so must have either been here 60 years ago, when the estate was a wooded area, or moved from another location. In keeping with the time-travelling nature of the post-box, it was topped with a Dalek, while the no-longer-used phone box, was a frostproof plant container!

With the Fine Pair cache, found, we headed North to find one of the multicaches. The final was a some distance away, and the twisty-turny nature of the roads and pavements, meant it took some time to reach Ground Zero. We were glad for a quick find, as the hiding place was very exposed in front of several houses, on a road junction.

We returned to the village centre and headed a little way south, picking up the other multi-cache.  Again another street sign was the host and a hint that confused Mrs Hg137, who seemingly never learnt the orientation of compass points based on the phrase.. “Never Eat Shredded Wheat” !

Time was pressing, and we limited our searching to one further cache. This was close to the car, but, at the time, many of roads and pavements were being dug up, and non-optimal alternatives meant we took longer than expected to arrive at GZ. The hint was magnetic, and it took us a few minutes to find the correct metal object, but once we did we had our largest container of the day.

There are still a few caches in the Elvetham Heath estate, which no doubt we will collect at some other time.

February 10 : Swyncombe and the snowdrops

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

St Botolph’s Church, Swyncombe

Today’s walk and geocaching adventure took us on a circular route, taking in parts of the Ridgeway and the Chiltern Way and, of course, the snowdrops at St Botolph’s Church. We’d passed the church while walking the Ridgeway back in the summer and had planned to return for the Snowdrop Festival.

There are lots of published snowdrop walks, but we decided to invent our own (similar) version to include some geocaches on our way.   Parking in a large layby on a country road, we set off south across Ewelme Downs.      We were caught up and passed by two lady muggles (non-geocachers) and their excitable spaniel, Banjo, so paused to give them an explanation of geocaching; otherwise, they might have wondered what on earth we were up to, poking around in bushes and behind trees!

We turned east, and climbed gently towards the edge of the Swyncombe Estate, and onto the bridleway known as Ladies Walk.   There were a surprising number of walkers about, and we had snowdrop themed chats with several of them.

Joining the Ridgeway, we reached Swyncombe Church.   Crikey, it was busy, we were glad we hadn’t tried to park here, there was no space on the narrow lane.    And the people … so many!  

But it was obvious why everyone was here.   The churchyard was carpeted by snowdrops and aconites.   We did several circuits of the churchyard, admiring both the tens of thousands of flowers, and the ginormous pieces of delicious cake on sale by the church.   It was lunchtime and we were tempted, very tempted … but we’d brought a picnic lunch with us, and removed ourselves to a quieter corner of the churchyard for a peaceful break.

After a few more circuits of the churchyard and many more pictures of the snowdrops, we moved off for the return leg of out walk.   Our morning’s caching had been part of the Ridgeway Ramble series of caches, while the afternoon was planned to be a number of puzzle caches that we’d solved over the previous few days.   Puzzle caches tend to be found less often than standard caches, and that also means they are harder to find (less logs to go on, no tell-tale ‘cacher’s path’ to the location).   We found five, distributed along a steep down-and-up section of the Ridgeway and the Chiltern Way. 

The Ridgeway

We stopped to chat to two walkers: yes, they’d seen the snowdrops (of course!) and they were also checking a route for a Ramblers walk in the next few days, which will, unsurprisingly, pass the snowdrops.    Our route now followed the wooded northern edge of Swyncombe Downs, along the line of a medieval earthwork, with expansive views across Oxfordshire to the north.    The woods gave way to a grassy hilltop, then we plunged down a steep descent through more woodland – skidding to a stop a couple of times to plunge into the undergrowth for a late cache or two – then we emerged back into full daylight at the start point of the walk.

A very old postbox

We’d saved one special cache for last: one from the ‘Victoria’s Post Box’ series, which celebrate the diminishing number of working postboxes from Queen Victoria’s reign.   We’d done copious online research and had come up with some coordinates, not too far from the box itself.   Parking close-ish to the final location, we went for a walk, and then spent a while crashing about in the undergrowth to no avail.  We read some old logs and came up with another location (well, exactly where we’d first looked). This time a more dedicated search and feel (and a torch) located the container. After the 30 minutes of angst locating the cache, this was our favourite for the day … apart from those fantastic snowdrops!

Here are some of the caches we found:

Ammo can under here!

January 29 : Ryde

We have mentioned on this blog before, that as well as geocaching we both play competitive Scrabble. Every year, around late January there is a 20 game tournament held on the Isle of Wight. This year was no exception, and we duly attended, competed and failed to trouble to the prize-winners. On our way back, we treated ourselves to some geocaching.

The Isle of Wight has hundreds of caches and we tend to focus on simple urban caches somewhere between the Scrabble venue on the South Coast, and the ferry terminal of Fishbourne in the North. We stick to urban caches, as we don’t have walking boots with us, and urban caching provides a level of bad-weather protection too.

This year we cached in Ryde. We have cached in Ryde several times before, but this time we would approach from the South East, head towards the sea, hopefully collect a couple of promenade caches, before heading back to our car.

Our first cache was on a crossroads of two paved footpaths. A smallish cache hidden in a tree, but the endless dogwalkers made searching tricky. Fortunately there was a handy ‘tourist information board’ nearby, where we could stand, sign the log, and more importantly wait for passers-by to, er, pass by before replacing the cache.

Our main walk initially took us away from Ryde passing through Appley Park. Here a cache had been planted in some tree roots –  how we found and replaced the cache without being spotted by a couple of dog walkers we don’t know. We had to pass the dog walkers soon after, and one of the dogs knew how to interact with strangers. A ball was dropped by Mr Hg137’s feet. “Throw it” the dog begged. Without a plastic ball thrower, Mr Hg137 was not going to pick up a wet, dog-slathered, ball, so he kicked it. Perhaps a bit too strongly, but the ball ran away at great pace. The path was slightly downhill, and the ball gathered so much momentum the dog had to run a long way before retrieving it. This gave us a minute or two to head down a side path, to our next cache. Sadly we didn’t find it! It was supposed behind a road sign (of which there were two obvious candidates some distance apart). The local council had also undertaken some hedge clipping near one of the signs, and we suspect the cache had disappeared.

What was interesting about this non-cache was that it was originally placed by Robb-Inn, a caching couple who used to live near us, and who moved to the Isle of Wight some years ago. The cache is now looked after by someone else.

We were on our furthest point from Ryde and we looped back behind an archery field, revisiting the park we left earlier. The path descended to the shoreline, where there were a number of seats – one of which hosted a cache. Of course we scoured the wrong seats to start with and when we found the cache, decided to break for coffee whilst signing the log. Here more dog walkers appeared. We counted about 4-5 people and 7-8 dogs. All the humans were standing around chatting, with dogs getting more and more impatient. One dog had worked out how gravity worked, and walked slightly uphill (within the confined of its lead), dropped a ball, watched it roll downhill, and then walked down and collected it, before heading a few doggy paces uphill before dropping the ball again!

A good tarmac path led us to Ryde, but first we diverted into some woodland to find another cache. The cache was hidden near a ‘photo opportunity’ of Appley Tower, a folly built on the Appley estate by the then owners in the late 1870s. Sadly there was scaffolding around the tower, which rather diminished the photo opportunity!

Our next cache was our hardest of the day. Called “A Loo with a view”. We expected the cache to be in front of the public conveniences with a view overlooking the sea. We searched the front and sides of the building, and found nothing. Eventually we found the cache behind the loos attached to the outer drainage pipes. Hardly a view!

We then had our second DNF of the morning, A cache we had failed to find back in 2018 and we failed to find it yet again. The GPS took us to some trees, many of the photos on www.geocaching.com show a brick wall. We were totally flummoxed, maybe in a year or so… we will get third time lucky here!

A few yards back from the sea front in Ryde is an ornamental pond. The pond contained a variety of birdlife, and nearby a group of artists were busy sketching and painting. Having passed the lake, we crossed to the sea front, and to one of the pay-to-view telescopes you see at the seaside. A magnetic cache was hidden underneath. This location is quite exposed, and we imagine in the Summer, when the tourist season is in full swing, this cache is difficult to attempt without being seen.

Time was drawing on, and we headed inland following a footpath towards our car. Our route took us past one more cache. It should have been a magnetic nut-and-bolt cache, but only half remained – fortunately the half with the log in. This took a bit of searching, as there were several metal structures that a magnet could have been affixed to.

In all we found 7 Caches, had 2 DNFs, but more importantly a pleasant walk in Winter sunshine after a couple of days sitting down exercising our brain. Roll on next year!

January 20 : Trackable : Sharing a cup of tea trying to get to Canada

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Sharing a cup of tea trying to get to Canada – not the snappiest title but very descriptive on the mission for this trackable:

Sharing a cup of tea trying to get to Canada

… “As I have a friend going to Thailand for a caching trip, she offered to take any trackables that were looking to go that way.  This is one of mine that I made to send with her. It would love to tour Thailand and area collecting lots of pictures along the way before eventually trying to get back to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada to me by the end of 2023. ”…

The story so far: setting off from Canada in October 2022, the trackable was duly taken to Asia, visiting Singapore and Indonesia, before being dropped off in January 2023 in a cache close to the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.   There it sat for some months, being discovered several times, but not picked up.   Finally, in November 2023, the trackable was picked up by TAROTHRUM, a geocacher from Singapore.   After another gap of two months, the trackable emerged in Weybridge, England, where we found it.   (I looked at TAROTHRUM‘s geocaching activity to see where they might have taken the trackable, but with few conclusions: he/she/they have only found about 200 caches in 10 years, but dotted all over the world – Singapore, the United States, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Portugal, Greece, and Indonesia.  I wonder if they are a pilot, or cabin crew, to fit in all that globetrotting?)

The trackable is now well on its way back to Canada, even if it is a little late for its target arrival date of the end of 2023.   We’ll move it on soon, when we find a cache where it will fit!

January 20 : Trackable : Community Volunteer Tag

During our caching trip around Weybridge, we found two trackables. Finding one trackable is quite rare, finding two very rare indeed. Also, trackables tend to be found in rural caches, rather than the urban ones in Weybridge.

Community Volunteer Trackable Tag

The first trackable was a Community Volunteer Tag. We have found at least one of these tags before – we believe they are given to noteworthy cachers on an ad hoc basis. This tag started in Poland in March 2022 and in less than 2 years has had a varied journey.

Not surprisingly its first few caches were in Poland/Germany/central Europe. It quickly arrived in the UK. Here it was taken to some iconic London landmarks, including Big Ben and Kew Gardens. It travelled to Australia (via the Philippines) and has been pictured outside the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Cricket Ground!

Returning to Europe, it toured France, Italy and Portugal, before another trip to Australia, before returning to the UK, and was placed in the Weybridge cache on Christmas Day 2023.

A well travelled trackable – good luck on your future adventures!

January 20 : Weybridge : our 800th blog post

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Weybridge, Oatlands Palace Gate

At last, a few days without rain!   Off we went to Weybridge, on the south-western edge of London, for some geocaching with firm, dry paths underfoot.   After finding some free street parking, we made our way towards the town centre, and the parish church, St James: we needed to count some objects in the churchyard and then to use them to derive coordinates giving us the location of the Church Micro cache nearby.

While in the churchyard, gazing at an impressive tomb, musing, we were approached by a passer-by, who stopped to give an enlightening talk about the town and its history, which gave us information we would use for the rest of the day.    The tomb is that of Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia – Duchess of York. A monument was erected to her – we’d visit that later, there’s another cache close by there.

Monument Green & original column top

Anyway, we worked out some coordinates for the Church Micro cache, a little way away, and decided to return to them later.    We walked out of the busy town centre and through quiet residential streets, collecting some caches as we went.    Looping back towards the town, we reached Monument Green.  The monument commemorates the Duchess of York, whose grave we’d seen earlier.   It was originally topped by a sundial which came from Seven Dials, in central London.    This proved a bit top heavy, so it was removed and is now on display by the library; we saw it later, and it was waaay too heavy for that slender column.    The adjacent cache was a milestone cache for us – 4500 finds !!! – and it’s a good location, an interesting place we wouldn’t have visited otherwise.

Fancy entrance to Portmore Park

From the green, we headed north, passing some impressive pillars which used to lead to Portmore Park (it’s now a housing estate).  We soon reached the river, at the confluence of the rivers Wey and Thames.  Both rivers were high, just within their banks, and flowing fast.  Just downstream was the Shepperton Ferry.  This place brings back memories – back from 2015 when we walked the Thames Path (it’s the only ferry crossing on the whole, nearly 200-mile path). Actually, our main memory was of hanging around on the far side of the Thames for about 25 minutes, waiting while the ferryman finished his lunch (or whatever he was doing!).  As the river was much, much higher and faster today, the ferry wasn’t running, but still a great spot and much reminiscing.

Passing D’Oyly Carte Island, we turned away from the river and followed wooded paths and fields back into the town.   Once there, we realised we’d missed out one of the caches on our list (doh!), so back we went, to look for ‘Orinoco’s Favourite space’.  We were expecting something to do with litter and Wombles, but, no, it was much-loved by the cache owner’s dog.   While searching, we were hailed by a dog-walking muggle (non-cacher), wanting to know if we were doing ‘a survey’. Sort of, we said, and Mr Hg137 explained geocaching to him while Mrs Hg137 found the cache container.

D’Oyly Carte Island

Also, once here, we realised we were very close to the location of Oatlands Palace, now a housing estate, once home to Princess Frederica.   We asked directions from a passing local and soon found ourselves at the surviving walls and archways of the palace.   Very interesting, we wouldn’t have come here but for the local historian we’d met in the churchyard earlier.

Back to the church, to find the Church Micro we’d calculated the coordinates for at the very start of the day.  Those coordinates (oh dear): we made not one, but two, howling errors, while working out the numbers, and spent some while searching an entirely wrong place, not once, but twice. We eventually started again, read the description properly and came up with some correct numbers which finally, finally led us to the cache.   (One of us has a degree in ‘hard sums’: we should have done better!)

Close to the church is a park and allotments (unusual to have such a big open space so close to a town centre).  while walking across the park towards a geocache, Mr Hg137 suddenly slowed, saying … ‘watch that man’ … he was just ahead of us, heading for a spot oh-so-close to where we were going, too. He bent down and picked something up; we walked up to him. Aha! a cacher caught red-handed! Good to meet you, Flyingfox76 ! Also good to meet you, mummycherub, who appeared very soon to ask to be added to the log. We swapped tales of caching, then went on our separate caching ways.

mummycherub and Flyingfox76

Our caching was nearly done now: we followed peaceful suburban streets to the south of the town centre, finding our last few caches, and returning to the geocar.   We enjoyed Weybridge: it had far more to see than we were expecting, lots of history, attractive corners, rivers, parks, and glimpses of the past.   A good place for a winter walk!

Here are a few of the lots of geocaches we found:

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!