September 7 : Saunton Sands – a film and a big pink rock

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Saunton Sands

It was the last morning of a scorching hot long weekend in Devon.  We packed up the car, but before we headed home we planned one final morning on the beach, at Saunton Sands.

We squeezed into one of the last spaces in the large car park.  It wasn’t so large today – a significant part of it was cordoned off for film vehicles, as a film shoot was taking place further along the beach.  We believe the film is ‘Aquaman 2‘ starring Jason Momoa.

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Filming in progress …

We dodged the film people, film security people, and a stream of film vehicles ferrying things along the beach, and arrived at the edge of the beach and the dunes.   We planned to find two earthcaches here.  The first was ‘Saunton Sands and Braunton Burrows’, which can be logged after doing research based on noticeboards around the area.  Sadly, the notices are missing at the moment, so we followed the interim instructions in the cache description, doing the research on Google instead.  It felt like a bit of a cheat.

First earthcache of the day

The second earthcache was going to be harder.   ‘Saunton Pink Erratic’ is at the foot of the cliffs approximately halfway between the beach and the end of Saunton Down.   It’s an erratic, which is a rock deposited somewhere that doesn’t match the surrounding area; we think it’s about 500 miles away from its original location. It’s ‘only’ half a mile from the entrance to the beach, but its half a mile of scrambling over near-vertical shards of shale.    Time passed.  We hopped from rock to rock, splitting up so we could each take what we thought was the best route.   More time passed.  We made slow progress.   This was turning out to be the hardest cache of the weekend, by a long way.   Forty-five (!) minutes later, we arrived at the big pink boulder.   Phew!   We took measurements and gathered the rest of the information we needed to log the cache, and then stopped for a most welcome cup of coffee.

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  Hard walk to the pink rock

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  That pink rock!

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  Hard walk back

What next?   Well, we wanted to spend the rest of the morning on the beach, paddle, and swim.  But our beach stuff was a difficult half a mile away, across the rocks and behind the dunes – and the tide had gone out a long, long way, so we would have an extended walk back, too.   I decided that I would paddle, not swim, but Mr Hg137 decided he would have a swim, no matter what.   He unzipped his walking trousers, to turn them into swimming shorts, and changed his clothes right there, next to the big pink rock.   (No-one could see us, as we were alone on the rocks, and not visible from the road at the top of the cliffs, or from the beach – unless they were at the top of a ship’s mast out at sea.)  

We scrambled our way back across the rocks to the beach.  That took a while, too.  Once on the sand, the shoes and socks came off.   Mr Hg137’s trainers had taken a bashing from those vertical rocks, my walking boots had survived better.  We swam, and paddled, and ate lunch, then reluctantly returned to the land and hit the road for the long, long drive home.

September 5 : Croyde and Baggy Point

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Croyde beach and Baggy Point

Ah, Croyde!  I last came here many, many years ago, during the long hot summer of ’76.  What could I remember of that family holiday?  Surprisingly little, actually.   The sun shone, as it always does in holiday memories, we went bodyboarding on plywood boards (!),  and we stayed in a house somewhere up the narrow lane leading to Baggy Point.   That was where we planned to do our geocaching for the day, ‘Bruno’s Baggy walk’.

Having taken one of the last spaces in the village car park, we headed for the beach, through the dunes, and over the rocks at the north end of the beach to reach Moor Lane.   I think we stayed somewhere here, back in the day, but it’s tidier now, more built up, and a National Trust car park has been added.   And there were LOTS more people!

As we walked gently uphill, the views opened out over the bay and we stopped to look for our first cache.  Nothing was obvious at our first glance, but we saw just a tiny flash of colour amongst the foliage, grabbed the cache, signed the log and returned it in the small gaps between the many passing muggles.

Continuing along the lane, the road became a track and the crowds gradually thinned out.  We spotted an empty bench and watched the people walk by, out for a Sunday morning walk.  Among them were families, dog walkers, and a smartly dressed young couple.  A little further on was our second cache, close to a gate.  We approached the gate – and two people were half-concealed, looking at a cache container. Hello, Navi-bear and friend!  The cache was a really easy find – it was handed to us and all we needed to do was sign the log and replace it while they went on ahead.

We meet some cachers!

We climbed up the hill, found another cache, and admired the expanding views as we neared the end of the headland, the real ‘Baggy Point’.   Just here was another cache, hidden somewhere near a signpost.  Once again we met Navi-bear and friend. They were scanning the area near the signpost, and weren’t having much luck. We joined them and we all looked hopefully around. Navi-bear looked at the pictures saved by other finders – now we knew what we were looking for. Finally one of them spotted the cache, really disguised in a container in the wall. My, that was very, very hard to spot and would have taken much longer without the photo!    We said goodbye to our new caching friends as they went on around the headland and we grabbed an empty bench for a picnic lunch overlooking the sea.

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  Coastguard Pole

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  Woolacombe View

Continuing clockwise around the headland, we passed the coastguard pole and rounded the headland.   We wanted to find the well-named ‘Woolacombe View’’ cache, and we definitely found the fantastic view, but couldn’t find the cache.   This was our only failure of the day, caching-wise; other cachers have looked since, and no-one has found it, so we reckon it is missing.

The coastal path continued to Woolacombe, but we climbed back over the hill through fields to return to the Croyde side of the headland.  There were three more caches along here, hidden in and around gates and stiles, watched by curious sheep and guarded by nettles and the occasional bit of barbed wire.  We escaped with a few stings, a light scratch, and a lot of hard, sheepy stares.

And then, the last cache of the series, on the steep hill leading down to the car park: part way down, the footpath split into two: given a choice between one small and rather overgrown path, or another more major path; we inevitably chose the wrong one and had to struggle to the undergrowth to the correct place.

So it was mid-afternoon, and our caching was done for the day.  What to do now?  Aha, what about the beach?  We returned to the geocar, replaced the caching ‘stuff’ with seaside ‘stuff’, and retraced our morning walk, this time down onto the beach for a couple of hours of paddling, swimming and lazing on the sand.   And, for me, it gave me another chance to try to work out where I stayed when I last came here.  It’ll be a trawl though old photos next!

Here are some of the caches we found:

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June 4 : Isles of Scilly : St Mary’s part 3 : the Garrison and Peninnis Head

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Porthcressa Beach and the Scillonian

On the last full day of the two extra days we had booked, we decided to explore some parts of St Mary’s that our guided walks hadn’t visited, and do a bit of caching along the way.

We decided to start with a circuit of the Garrison, the westernmost part of St Mary’s.  After a short steep walk up Garrison Hill and through the fortified gate, we set off round the coast path strewn with fortifications. Part way along, there was a cache hidden behind a seat, with a grand view out west over the islands of Samson and St Agnes.  Or there should have been: we looked high and low all around the seat, but there was no sign of a cache.   Oh well…

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  Garrison Hill

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  Garrison Gate

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  Star Castle Hotel

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  View to Samson, Bryher, and Tresco

We gradually climbed a track to the top of the hill, went off a little way to find a cache overlooking tennis courts, then came to a football field.  It is the home of the smallest football league in the world, the Isles of Scilly Football League  which only has two teams, Woolpack Wanderers and Garrison Gunners.  Mr Hg137 couldn’t resist the chance to supply some football coaching to a teenager who was learning how to curve a ball.   Little did he know that others have been there before him (back in 2008 Adidas ran ad campaign, “Dream Big”, when the youth side were coached by some very famous players, among them David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and Patrick Vieira.  There’s a series of one, two, three, and four videos. David Beckham teaches how to curve the ball in the third video; had I known I would have shot some video of Mr Hg137 treading the same turf, kicking the same shots!

Smallest football league in the world

Bend it like …

Caches attempted, we walked back down the hill, passed the Star Castle Hotel, along Porthcressa Beach and then out onto Peninnis Head.  We passed the island allotments and were soon out on the coast path overlooking the rocky shore. The allotments have the best view of any I have seen, though the high hedges round each plot suggest they’re battered by the wind; we passed an allotment holder, carrying a huge lettuce and a bag of new potatoes, and he said there had been no frost that winter so the potatoes were planted in February (gulp, it was late April when our potatoes were planted).

Peninnis lighthouse

Pulpit Rock

We stopped for lunch, backs to a large rock, looking out to sea past the lighthouse at the end of the point, and then applied ourselves to our next cache, Pulpit Rock, hidden close to one of the named rock formations of jointed granite at the edge of the sea.   The search took a while, there are many crevices and hollows, all on a very steep slope right above the ocean.   The cache was originally placed in August 2001, and it is England’s 12^th oldest active cache (and we have found six of them!).   Imagine our puzzlement when we found another cache container hidden under a nearby rock close by. We signed both logs, to be certain, but we are not sure if this other container is a cache … or not?

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  Is this the real cache?

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  Or this one?

A little way inland, we came to a millstone.  It seemed an odd place to find one, but there used to be a windmill here … and now there’s a cache.   We sat on the nearby seat to sign the log and watched a tame sparrow and blackbird hoping for a crumb or two from us. Then a gentleman appeared at the millstone and sat down on it. Was he a cacher? No, a locum dentist enjoying his lunchbreak!

Returning to the coast path, we walked round into Old Town, to revisit the church and find the associated Church Micro cache.  We had visited the church earlier in the week and been told about the monuments, the two British politicians buried in the churchyard and much more.  As a result we were a little cocky about using the waypoints, got ourselves in a tangle, and went round the graveyard several times.  Next, we found we had already passed the cache and needed to retracing our steps to find it.  Mr Hg137 delved into the undergrowth and failed to see a low branch. Crunch !

We walked back into Hugh Town and back to the strand, overlooking the harbour.  It was only mid-afternoon, and we decided we had time for one more cache, another Church Micro, starting at Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church, on the strand overlooking the harbour. Earlier in our holiday, we had ambled by this church several times; if only we had researched and calculated the numbers then…  As it was, our walking around Peninnis was not over. The cache took us back where we had been much, much earlier in the day. The day was hot, and our legs were weary..and the water at Porthcressa Beach was so inviting….but we are cachers.  A long trek later, we reached our target and the cache log was signed.

Finally, there was time for a Troytown Farm icecream and a paddle before packing to leave.  Mr Hg137 was all set for a swim – he changed his mind after he saw the jellyfish!

And was that the end of our caching on the islands?   Read the postscript in the next post to find out.

Here are some of the caches we found:

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September 26 : Abbotsbury and the swans

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

On a sparkling bright Saturday, we were out to do touristy things in delightful Dorset. There would be a few caches too, of course!

Abbotsbury Swannery opened at 10am, and we were in the village earlier than that, with time for just one cache before opening time, the appropriately named ‘Swans’ – a puzzle cache that we had solved at a few days earlier. There was a cryptic paragraph of text to consider, then some sums, which made little sense at first. An ‘aha’ moment followed, and the equation below made sense:
N50 Young Swan . Cygnet/4 (Mute Swan + 1)
W002 (Mute Swan * 2) . (Young Swan – Eggs – Cygnet/4) (Swan&Cygnet – Cygnet/3)

Then it was off to see some swans. I’ve been to the Swannery before, most recently in the late ‘90s when I helped with the Swan Census. It is just such an extraordinary experience to be handed a live, wild swan. Here’s a video of the swan census

We spent a couple of hours at the Swannery, going around the swan-shaped maze (Covid restrictions have made it into a labyrinth, but it’s still good), then the swannery itself, the duck decoys, and the prototype bouncing bomb recovered from the Fleet.

Socially distanced maze

Bouncing bomb

As we watched the swans, I wondered if I had seen any of them before: wild mute swans can live almost 20 years and where they are looked after (as here) it can be longer. It’s possible that some of the swans here now are children (or grandchildren) of the ones I helped to count. Or … if they were very young at the time of ‘my’ census, and quite old now, swan-wise, some of the very same swans …

Next on our pre-booked list of things to do was the Abbotsbury subtropical gardens , but we had a little while till our timed ticket, so we headed for the beach.

Chesil Beach

It was Chesil Beach – where we sat on the shingle, enjoyed a picnic lunch, and watched the sea anglers. And then, just up the road, were the gardens, which were lush and jungly, with a walk out to a superb viewpoint over Chesil Beach, over to Portland to the east, and, in the distance, Start Point in Devon to the west. We went round twice just to make sure we didn’t miss anything.




Next, in mid-afternoon, we made our way back into Abbotsbury for a bit of geocaching. First of all: a Church Micro cache: the church is adjacent to the village car park so it was a very short walk into the churchyard to locate the answers to the coordinate clues, then another very short walk to the final location. Once there, the GPS didn’t seem to point to the correct place, and nothing very close by matched the hint, but widening the search a little and a ‘cacher’s eye’ soon spotted the hiding place. (Editor’s note: as you find more caches you get an idea of the kinds of places that caches might be hidden and tell-tale signs to look out for).

Abbotsbury Church

Abbotsbury village

Our next cache lay along a disused railway line, the Abbotsbury branch line Who’d have thought it – a disused railway line in Abbotsbury! And we doubted it, too, as we walked up a farm track leading to the cache. Then we turned a corner, and were unmistakeably on an old railway line, flat and straight, a shape of a platform on the right and a railway shed ahead. A short distance further along the old line was the cache, cunningly hidden amongst some old railway items.

Railway shed – where are the trains?

Our day in Abbotsbury was now done. On our way back to the hotel in Dorchester we climbed Portesham Hill onto the Wessex Ridgeway, topped by the Hardy Monument (Editor’s note: it’s not a monument to Thomas Hardy, the writer, but instead Thomas Masterman Hardy, one of the commanders at the Battle of Trafalgar.)

Hardy Monument, Black Down, Dorset

We had one final cache to find, Blackdown, named after the hill on which the monument stands. We parked a little way away from both monument and cache and walked along the top of the ridge, with wide views to both north and south, and belted Galloway cattle grazing on the heathland. We came upon a structure; at first I thought it was a ruined building, but I was wrong; it’s a new artwork, the Black Down stone circle

Black Down Stone Circle

Arriving at the monument, we surveyed the view out to sea, past Weymouth and Portland to the dormant cruise ships parked in Weymouth Bay, and then worked out the coordinates for the cache from items nearby. From here, we set off downhill to the cache (everything is downhill from the monument, so that’s not much of a clue!) Arriving at our calculated position, we located the cache, then slogged back uphill to the road and our geocar.

A grand day out! And here are some caches:

September 25 : Weymouth

Our first full day in Dorset was spent exploring Weymouth.

Weymouth Harbour

There was much to see from a bird-sanctuary, Weymouth’s olde-worlde streets, the harbour, the maritime history and of course the beach.

Our day started at the Bird Sanctuary at Radipole Lake. The RSPB had given permission for 4 caches to be placed around the lake, and a swift walk around before most visitors arrived, meant we had 4 trouble-free finds. As we walked from cache to cache we kept our eyes peeled for unusual species such bearded tits and kingfishers..sadly all we saw were relatively common birds such as swans and ducks.

“Do you have food ?”

On one occasion a swan blocked our path and we wondered how we would pass it without being attacked. Fortunately as we neared, so did an elderly couple approaching from the other direction. They had been given permission to feed the swan…and this was its regular time and location. So as seed was thrown, we sidled by socially distancing from the swan and the elderly couple.

After completing the 4 caches we headed towards the Marina part of the town. We walked down a couple of streets including one where a bus station/bus garage was overlooked by a block of apartments. We were aiming for a seat overlooking the bowling green. Here there were two benches, one of which was a memorial bench with names and dates we needed for a multi-cache. We chose not to sit on that bench, but on the drier one close by. We quickly extracted the dates and performed the final coordinate calculation over a coffee. The final seemed slightly further away than we might have expected, but since Weymouth is a compact town, with many caches, it didn’t seem too implausible.

We walked towards the calculated coordinates, passing the marina and crossing the town bridge. We climbed some steps to arrive at… a place that was nothing like the cache hint! Whoops ! We had miscalculated the coordinates… (Ed : actually in our haste to secure the dry seat for coffee we misread a 3 for an 8 causing us quite a long walk…we subsequently discovered the cache was hidden near to the apartments and bus station!)

The saving grace of our miscalculation…a fine view of Weymouth

The only saving feature of our ineptitude was that we well placed for other caches in Weymouth. Weymouth Harbour has two long ‘spits’ flanking it to the North and South. We walked along the Southern spit, first finding a cache in the brewing quarter, and then finding a cache outside Nothe Fort. We hadn’t tickets to go round the Fort but even from the outside it is an impressive defensive structure. We paused for lunch, finding an excellent spot out of the chill, Northerly wind prior to retracing our steps along the Southern spit to the Town Bridge.

We paused just short of the Town Bridge to find an Earthcache hidden in the harbour walls. Weymouth is on the Jurassic Coast and the harbour walls are made from stone containing small organisms from the Jurassic era. We sat awkwardly on the sea wall, measuring, counting, investigating the tiny fragments many visitors to Weymouth barely notice.

Jurassic Creatures

The Northern Spit also yielded a cache, this one a multi which we got right ! It helped that many of the questions and waypoints we had googled first and knew exactly where the final cache was. Under a seat at the far end of the spit. Sadly there were 3 seats to check, and despite our best efforts, it took several passes of the seats before we found the tiny nano. Unlike our previous multi, this multi was educational as it took us to locations based on Weymouth’s history notably the Civil War, an alien invader and an historic voyage.

At least 2 cannon ball hits during the Civil War !

Another Plaque, a different War

Normally the end of the spit is quiet, save for some fishermen, but this year many more people have walked to the far end as it gives a view of the many cruise ships moored, with nowhere to go, waiting for Covid-19 pandemic to end.

How many cruise ships can you spot ?

We too looked at the ships, and then turned left and headed to Weymouth’s tourist area, the beach. A long sandy beach overlooked by hotel after hotel. (Ed : we would like to apologise to Weymouth’s Tourist Agency… we forgot to take a picture of the lovely beach! ). We found a cache on the seafront before heading into the narrow streets behind the hotel.

We were looking for a Church Micro, but unusually it was another Earthcache. We are again asked questions about Jurassic creatures, but this time they were less plentiful in the Church Walls and it took us several minutes to find the swirls and curls of the ancient creatures.

Weymouth’s Anzac Memorial

Our final cache of the day was near the ANZAC memorial on the Esplanade. Injured Australian and New Zealand soldiers who fought in WWI (notably Gallipoli and the Western Front) were brought back to Weymouth to recuperate. The memorial was erected in 2005.

A nearby shelter hosted the cache and with several seats facing the sea (occupied by two men) and several seats roadside. Fortunately the hint said ‘roadside’. We searched, as covertly as we could, to no avail. We read some previous cacher’s comments which included the term ‘string magnet’. We’d never heard of a string magnet, but set about looking for string. Again nothing.

Then we heard a voice.

“Are you looking for that metal box?”

“Eh – pardon ? ” we replied.

“Are you looking for that metal box?” – it was one the two men on the other side of the seat.

“Er, yes” we said sheepishly.

“Its there” – he pointed “its quite hard to get out”.

Apparently the gentleman frequently sat roadside and helped people find the cache. He wasn’t the owner, just a guardian angel. It was though hard to get out.. it wasn’t held by a string magnet but a STRONG magnet !

So an unusual end to a great day – lots to see and do in Weymouth with a variety of caches and locations.

As always here are a few of the caches we found

and also an entertaining quiz that we found in a shop window.

In one of the shop windows was a display of mice with different occupations. Apparently the design changes every year…this year all the mice had masks!! Can you spot each different mouse ?

May 23 : Llandudno and the Great Orme

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

After three days in and around Chester, we ventured further afield for a day at the seaside at Llandudno, and the geocar was soon parked on the seafront. We perambulated pleasantly along the promenade to our first geocache of the day, based on information to be found around the war memorial. Coordinates gathered, we moved off to the cache location, retrieved the cache, and were just signing the log, when we were interrupted … by a bird (a juvenile jackdaw?) who clearly thought that our rucksacks might contain food. They most certainly did, but it wasn’t on offer!

But our main objective for the day wasn’t at sea level, but higher up, on the Great Orme. By the way, the name comes from the Vikings, and means ‘sea serpent’. Mr Hg137 knows that I’m easily swayed by quaint modes of transport, and there’s a tramway up the Great Orme if you don’t fancy the walk http://www.greatormetramway.co.uk We queued up with throngs of other people, then set off in a striking Edwardian tram carriage up an incredibly steep track.


Actually, it’s not one tram, but two, with a halfway station where you change trams. Maybe it’s not possible to string a single cable all the way to the top round some sharp twists and turns. We got at the changeover point and took a short walk to Great Orme copper mine http://www.greatormemines.info How many Bronze Age mines can you visit? Not many – but we didn’t have time and contented ourselves with finding the earthcache based on the rocks around the entrance to the mine.

Great Orme Mine

Great Orme Mine

Back at the tram station, we re-boarded and took the shorter ride to the summit on a much less crowded tram. We emerged from the station almost at the top, almost 700 feet above sea level. It was cooler here, and much windier. Up here there are expansive views, an old observatory, now a café, a playground, the terminus for the cable car, and much more. Just outside the tram station is a statue of a Kashmiri goat; they roam on the Great Orme, keeping scrub in check, and I was hoping to see the real thing, but it wasn’t to be, and I had to content myself with some distant views of sheep. Never mind.

Kashmiri goat – but a statue, not a real one

We had thought it might be difficult to search for caches up here, as there were many, many people around, but there was anonymity to be had among so many people, and we didn’t get even one curious glance. Of the two caches at the summit, one is a traditional cache, close to the summit cairn, which was a little dilapidated when we visited (it’s been repaired since) and another earthcache, which needed us two find two kinds of geological information and have a look at the medieval ridge and furrow part way down the hill.

There was another cache not far from the summit, giving us a chance to step away from the crowds. Almost immediately we were on our own, walking across springy turf dotted with sheep, with a wide-ranging view out to the north and a large wind farm. We got close-ish to the cache site. Where was it? Mmm: we were stood at the top of a small cliff, and the cache was doubtless at the bottom of said cliff. Oh dear: I really didn’t fancy some hardcore rock climbing. We looked around and found a steep path, fortunately on dry grass, that made its way round to the base of the cliff. Once there, we still couldn’t find the cache. Where was it? Mmm: where would the sheep shelter from showers? Aha! That was where the cache was concealed.

Return tram journey

It was well into the afternoon by now, and we had spent three or four hours up on the Great Orme, enjoying ourselves as the time flashed by. We returned to the tram and took the trip back down into the town. The school day was now over and there were lots more children about, cycling on the promenade, down on the beach, having a fine time. We looked at the beach, and the sea, and decided it was time for a short paddle before returning to the geocar. The shoes came off, trousers were rolled up, and in we went – and – it wasn’t cold!

Llandudno West Beach

We prepared to return to Chester, an hour’s drive away. But first: one more cache, on the other side of town, sort of on our way back. It was a puzzle cache, solved by completing an online jigsaw showing the view from the cache; as the jigsaw is completed, the coordinates are revealed. I like jigsaws and this one was a few minutes fun to solve. The cache is at Llandudno West Beach, overlooking Conwy Sands. It’s a much quieter, less brash side of the town, with a beautiful sheltered beach and gently breaking waves, plus a glorious view along the Welsh coast … just as the jigsaw promised.

Conwy Sands from Llandudno West Beach

This was a perfect cache to end the day: it had a good puzzle, a great location and a good cache container at the end of the hunt. We returned to our hotel tired but well pleased.

Here are some of the caches we found:

May 26 : Devon / Cornwall : Day 5 : poems, surf, and chefs: Greenaway, Polzeath, and Padstow

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Polzeath surfers

Greenaway is my family name. And I well remember the toe-curling, red-cheeked embarrassment at school when we studied John Betjeman’s poem ‘Greenaway’. But this meant that I knew there was a beach in Cornwall of that name, and a little research showed that there was also a cache of the same name near that beach. So there was no way, no way at all, that a visit to Cornwall was not going to include a visit to Greenaway. And here is that poem … it’s not that long if you aren’t into poetry …

South West Coast Path – to Greenaway

GREENAWAY
by John Betjeman

I know so well this turfy mile,
These clumps of sea-pink withered brown,
The breezy cliff, the awkward stile,
The sandy path that takes me down.

To crackling layers of broken slate
Where black and flat sea-woodlice crawl
And isolated rock pools wait
Wash from the highest tides of all.

I know the roughly blasted track
That skirts a small and smelly bay
And over squelching bladderwrack
Leads to the beach at Greenaway.

Down on the shingle safe at last
I hear the slowly dragging roar
As mighty rollers mount to cast
Small coal and seaweed on the shore,

And spurting far as it can reach
The shooting surf comes hissing round
To heave a line along the beach
Of cowries waiting to be found.

Tide after tide by night and day
The breakers battle with the land
And rounded smooth along the bay
The faithful rocks protecting stand.

But in a dream the other night
I saw this coastline from the sea
And felt the breakers plunging white
Their weight of waters over me.

There were the stile, the turf, the shore,
The safety line of shingle beach
With every stroke I struck the more
The backwash sucked me out of reach.

Back into what a water-world
Of waving weed and waiting claws?
Of writhing tentacles uncurled
To drag me to what dreadful jaws?

The beach at Greenaway

To return to the post … We parked the geocar on – yes on – Polzeath beach, after Mr Hg137 had reassured himself that it would not be swept away by a wave coming from the distant sea (it wasn’t). It was then a super walk on a sparkling clear May morning, of about a mile along the coast path, to a seat overlooking the little beach of Greenaway. Once there, a mid-morning coffee was drunk, while a gentle search around the seat revealed the cache. Success! But I had an additional plan. I was going down ‘to the beach at Greenaway’. And so we did. There are a few steps down to an unspoilt small sandy beach surrounded by rocks. What a lovely place!

Surfers at Polzeath

After that indulgence, we walked back to Polzeath, where there was another cache overlooking the bay. We spent a while looking for it, before re-reading the description and hint and realising what and where we needed to look. Then we turned the geocar south around the Camel estuary to arrive in Padstow. The nearest cache to our parking place was the Church Micro at Padstow, so we set off to find it. We were thwarted … by a wedding, which was about to start, with photographers planning their shots and guests beginning to drift in. It didn’t seem right to intrude on that so we moved on, intending to return later.

I want your lunch!

The busy, crowded harbour seemed like a good place to have lunch, so we ate our sandwiches, defending them against a seagull that wanted them, and wondering exactly where the cache we knew was on the other side of the harbour could be. Lunch completed, and the seagull vanquished, and we strolled over to the slipway where the cache would be hidden. But we didn’t find it. More correctly, we couldn’t even look for it, as so many muggles were fishing for crabs off the slipway that we couldn’t make ourselves conspicuous by searching. Once again, we moved on.

Padstow harbour – right by a cache – much too busy to search here!

We meandered on, past Rick Stein’s cookery school, the National Lobster hatchery http://www.nationallobsterhatchery.co.uk , and a cycle hire business, heading for the Camel trail http://www.cornwall.gov.uk/cameltrail which is a disused railway line heading inland from Padstow to Wadebridge and eventually to Bodmin. Suddenly the bustle of Padstow was behind us and we were looking out over the river, with only cyclists, runners and walkers for company. There are caches all along this trail, but we had time for just one, from the ‘Benny’s Quest’ series. Luckily, this was just out of view of the trail, so we had time and space to search without attracting attention. We needed that space and time as we hunted around for a while before finding a cache fashioned from a piece of pipe, hidden in the shade in a wall.

We needed to return, so we walked back into Padstow, and through the narrow streets by the harbour, full of trendy shops, galleries, and restaurants, including a couple more of Rick Stein’s restaurants. We arrived back at the churchyard, hoping for another try at that Church Micro, but the wedding wasn’t quite over – the organ was still playing and there were still guests in the churchyard. Yet again, we moved on; we just didn’t time that one right.

It was still only mid-afternoon, but we had an evening appointment, at the open air theatre at the Sterts Centre. Off we went, stopping for a meal at the Cheesewring Hotel http://cheesewringhotel.co.uk/ in Minions, which we had visited three days earlier – it bills itself as the highest pub in Cornwall at 995 feet above sea level. And the play … it poured with rain all evening, and, while it was nice and dry under the theatre canopy, it was really hard to hear anything above the rain. Luckily, we’d mugged up on the plot of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ first … as the only thing we knew about the play was the famous stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” … which is what I’m about to do now! Growl!

Here, in no particular order, are the caches we found:

December 19 Thames Path : Cannon Street Railway Bridge to Canary Wharf.

We had about 10-11 miles left of our journey down the Thames, and we decided rather than have one long section and poor light to contend with, we would break the last few miles into 2 sections. The first would take us to Canary Wharf, with its gleaming skyscraper office blocks.

Our Destination … Canary Wharf

Most of the walk would be on the Northern bank, picking up caches from a series entitled “From the Swan to the Canary” a reference to Swan Pier where the series starts and Canary Wharf where the series ends.
We would omit some of the caches in the series as we wanted to attempt some of the Southern bank caches as well.

But first we returned to where we finished our previous walk.

We were UNDER Cannon Street Railway Bridge on the Thames Foreshore.
Hidden against the various chains and holes in a brick wall was a magnetic 35mm container. About 12 foot up! Now, neither of us are giants, but having checked various photos on http://www.geocaching.com we had a likely plan to reach this difficulty 4, terrain 4.5 cache. Just under the cache was a concrete footing, with a 5ft iron pipe rising from it. If one could stand on the pipe – the cache would be within reach…

Heave, heave, pull, pull

There are two ways to reach the top of the pipe. The first was to ‘crawl around a wall corner’ with a 6 foot drop beneath or to haul oneself up onto the pipe using a chain fixed to a wall. Mr HG137 tried the latter and after 10 minutes gave up. His arms were still weak from his bone-break, and the iron pole was still wet and slippery from the tide. We could have spent some time trying to access the pole top, but with the full day’s walk ahead of us we moved on.
So a slightly disappointing start, but we feared as much so it didn’t seem that bad.

Our first real cache was the first in the Swan to Canary series. The hint alluded to a sign, which we could see, but we couldn’t see the cache! We looked further afield and eventually found the small magnetic film container attached to a gate. Phew!

Then over the river to an unusual cache – a sidetracked Earthcache. Sidetracked caches are part of a National series where the caches are in or near Railway Stations. This one was near London Bridge Station. However what made it special was the Earthcache qualities. At Ground Zero were 2 lumps of granite, from the London Bridge demolished in the late 1960s. These lumps of granite were mined at Haytor in Devon (we have stayed with http://www.hfholidfays.co.uk half a mile from the mine!) so we felt we had a connection with the cache. Being an Earthcache we had to undertake various scientific analysis of the stones and report our findings to claim the cache find.

Granite from the Previous London Bridge

Further along the Southern bank we came to HMS Belfast. Here you can see three great London landmarks together : HMS Belfast, The Tower of London and Tower Bridge. And it’s full of tourists. Lots of them. We thought this would make the next cache hard to find, but given a very accurate hint, and an Oscar-winning ‘tourist impression’ (taking lots of pictures!) the cache was retrieved, signed and replaced before we drew suspicion.

3 London Icons

We returned to the Northern bank over the tourist filled Tower Bridge, pausing to admire the ‘Girl with a Dolphin’ statue – now showing its age a little, and making sure that the Dickens Inn was where we remembered it to be. (We didn’t go in, but we did frequent it on one of our early dates many years ago!).

Girl with a Dolphin

Dickens Inn

Our next cache was a little away from the Thames Path, but being part of the Swan/Canary series we thought it would be worth attempting. Sadly GZ was on/near/under a number of concrete bridges, and our GPS never gave us an accurate location. The cache hint gave some idea, but we never really got close. Disappointing as we had drifted a little away from our route to attempt the cache!

Thames Barges, the Shard and Tower Bridge

The Northern Bank route took us in a zigzag route from the river, to the streets (Wapping High St) going in front of city apartments and behind wharves closed down many years ago. Eventually we arrived at Wapping Old Steps which led down to the Foreshore. Here, another cache awaited us, a very tightly screwed nano which took both us to unscrew. As we remarked in our previous log, the foreshore is very, very quiet and provides a completely different London atmosphere to the London streets just a few yards away. (Wapping Old Stairs and its foreshore still evoke a different era and appeared as a film location in the 2015 Christmas Edition of “Call the Midwife” – we’re quite sure its appeared in many other films and TV episodes).

Wapping Old Stairs

Onward we went with Canary Wharf getting larger with every step we took. Our next cache, was a small nano in a seat. But from the seat we could see a hangman’s noose! We were next to one of London’s oldest pubs The Prospect of Whitby, and outside on the foreshore is a mock-noose celebrating the pub being the hostelry of choice for “hanging” Judge Jeffreys.

Don’t hang around too long here!

Our next cache in a small London park was far more tranquil… but the next found us in a tricky predicament. The cache was under a small wooden footbridge which had enough wriggle room to go underneath. We had three futile attempts at wriggling underneath avoiding ‘muggle traffic’ before we found the cache, and foolishly we didn’t take the clip-lock box away from GZ to sign the log. (We like to move a few yards away to deflect interest). We had the cache open, signing the log, with all the trinkets on display when we asked by a small (5 year old?) girl, what we doing. Fortunately her mother appeared and we explained about geocaching. The girl wanted many of the trinkets but we settled on a small pink notebook. Fingers crossed she doesn’t tell others of the ‘treasure hidden beneath the bridge’.

The Swan/Canary series took us to many varied locations including a statue celebrating the work of ropemakers as well some very swanky metal-work (where the cache could only be found by looking in one very specific location).

Celebrating the Ropemakers of London

Eventually the towers of the Canary Wharf complex were above us, and we had one more cache to find.. a Church Micro. This Church micro, newly published, was based on St Peter’s Barge, London’s only floating Church. We found the answers to the clues near the church and walked to the final Ground Zero. Concrete pillars, overhead railway lines meant our GPS couldn’t get us close to the location and we gave up! A slightly poor end to an eventful day’s caching.

St Peter’s Barge, London’s Floating Church

Here are some of the caches we found :

Thames Path statistics :

Route length : 3.75 miles
Total distance walked : 178 miles

Caches found : 9
Total caches found : 329

December 4 Thames Path : Vauxhall Bridge to Cannon Street Railway Bridge

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Allo, allo, allo … we were rumbled!

On a bright December morning we resumed our walk down the Thames Path.  It had been so long … assorted commitments had kept us from our Thames Path mission for a whole month … but we were back.

Getting quickly under way with two caches around Vauxhall Bridge and Station, we joined the Thames Path, soon arriving at a small patch of grass, with some seats, overlooking the Thames.  There was a cache here somewhere; but the GPS wouldn’t settle and we spent quite a few minutes searching in, on, and under various likely locations.  We were on the point of giving up when …”Excuse me Sir, what are you doing?”  Oops! We’d been stopped by the police … two of them, a policeman and policewoman.  The geocache description had told us what to do if this should happen …

“This cache is located within an area frequently patrolled by Police & Security. Avoid acting suspiciously when searching, if challenged, explain about Geocaching”

Helping with our enquiries!

… so we explained … and then they offered to help us in our search for the cache!  An unexpected outcome, we’d been thinking that a caution was coming!  With so many eyes and hands searching, the cache was soon found.

Westminster Bridge: busy, busy busy

Westminster Bridge: security conscious

Towards Westminster, the path became busier and busier with throngs of tourists, so busy that we didn’t manage to find the next two caches.  Turning onto Westminster Bridge, there was a HUGE security presence – this was a couple of days after the government decision to take military action in the Middle East.   We turned away from the Houses of Parliament and all those police and roadblocks to set off along the north bank of the Thames.  A little way ahead were red phone boxes; we knew there was a cache inside one of them, but what was happening outside?  A camera was being fixed to a tree, a presenter was doing a piece to another camera, and filming chaos was in progress.  Diversionary activity was called for (from us), so Mr Hg137 engaged the film crew in conversation (it turned out to be a shoot for a fashion blog) while I slipped into the phone box and retrieved and replaced the cache.

Geocache – or fashion shoot?

Looking across at the London Eye – we’ve had good times on that before – we strolled on a little way to Cleopatra’s Needle, site of another cache and of an earthcache too.  Once again, this made us look much closer at a monument we’d seen many times before; quite a bit of the questions posed for this cache centre on a bomb which exploded very close to the base of the monument, and caused some damage.   Answers calculated, we paused for lunch in the nearby Embankment Gardens; there was a multicache here, too, but we couldn’t even attempt it as the statue (of a camel) which would have provided the answers had been boarded up to protect it from a nearby Christmas event; there was just the camel’s nose showing above the hoarding; with hindsight, we could have done the research beforehand and not needed the statue.

Spot the camel!

After lunch, we crossed back over the river at Waterloo Bridge.  There were caches both sides of the river, but there were two on the south bank that we especially wanted to attempt. They were down on the foreshore, so only accessible at low tide, using metal steps to get down to the shore. We’d checked the tide tables and knew we would be OK (always best to check; there’s a big tidal range on the Thames and the tide comes in – and goes out – at a ferocious speed).  The first was another earthcache, involving “things” to do with rocks on the foreshore, and the second was a conventional cache, but hidden away well below the high tide mark, lashed securely to the bank.  Both were easy to do, but neither of us had anticipated how different it would feel when down on the shore.  The noise of traffic and people dies away, so it is surprisingly quiet … and there is sand!  We weren’t expecting sand.

Back up on the Queen’s Walk and back with the crowds and the noise, we walked on till we reached Tate Modern, with an iconic (and protected) view of St Paul’s Cathedral across the Millenium Bridge.  There was a cache near here, appropriately called ‘Wobbly Bridge’ – the bridge gained that nickname just after it opened, when it swayed rather too much, and had to be speedily closed for strengthening.   We walked across the bridge – it didn’t wobble – as there was a virtual cache just the other side of the bridge, or more correctly, just under the other side of the bridge.  Here was another place we wouldn’t have known about had it not been for geocaching, a new piece of sculpture with at least one item on it that is of interest to geocachers – and that’s the answer to the cache, so no spoilers here!  And that was our last success of the day; we tried, and failed to find a few more caches, ending up once again, in the gathering gloom, on the Thames foreshore very close to Cannon Street Railway Bridge; more about this in the next post; we came back to try again!

Here, in no particular order, are some of the caches we found:

It seemed like much longer, but it was just three miles!

Thames Path statistics :

Route length : 3 miles
Total distance walked : 174.25 miles

Caches found : 13
Total caches found : 320

February 14 – Isle of Wight – Sandown and Scrabble

… the Scrabble weekend was actually 2 9-game tournaments back to back. There was also promotion and relegation between the two tournaments.

Both of us were playing in the highest division and by Saturday lunchtime were lying just above the relegation zone, with 3 games still to go. (Not good!)

The timetable was being adhered to, and we also finished our pre-lunch games early so a quick dash to the hotel room to grab the GPS, find a sandwich-shop on route, and head to the cache site.

The cache we had chosen was part of the ‘Nostalgia’ series set by a group of people all of whom attended the same Junior school on the Island, way back in the 1970s. This cache was called ‘Battery Gardens’. The Gardens are named after the former Battery station on the site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandown_Barrack_Battery.

Lunch overlooking Sandown Bay

With limited time, we were hoping for a quick find. The cache was in a bush, and after 15 minutes searching we gave up and had lunch overlooking the sea. There are only a finite number of places ‘in a bush’ so we went back for a further 5 minute look, and found it! Cleverly hidden, using a new-to-us method of placement ‘under a bush’.

Log book and bush… but how did we retrieve it ?

A brisk walk back along the cliff top, and then back to the Scrabble… would we survive in the top division or would we be relegated ?