September 6 : Appledore and Westward Ho!

Our last full day of our stay in North Devon – and a busy one too!

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First stop was the Dartington Glass Factory, where for limited times of day, visitors can see glass being blown, shaped, cooled, checked and boxed in the factory. Unsurprisingly the factory was very, very hot and watching the craftsmen work very mesmerising.

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Dartington Crystal

There were no caches close to the factory, so we travelled to the village of Appledore. In former times a bustling fishing port and boat-builders. Our first cache was in sight of boat-building yard, Richmond Dock. A nearby wall proudly shows all the boats made there. Appledore has a strong connection to the Isles of Scilly, which we had visited earlier this year. The ferry link between the Cornwall and Scilly, Scillonian III, was built in Appledore, and Appledore also sends teams to the Gig-Racing World Championships on Scilly.

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Appledore’s Gigs undercover

The cache we were looking for was in some railings, and with no-one (apparently) around, save a lady at a bus-stop, we furiously searched around. We consulted the online logs for a glint of extra information, and with it, Mr Hg137 had the ‘Eureka’ moment of knowing where the cache was. But, at that moment, some tourists arrived (we’ve still no idea how or when they arrived) and stood exactly where Mr Hg137 wanted to search. Eventually they moved off, and we moved in. Cache in hand, log signed…the rest of Appledore Harbour awaited.

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Appledore was quiet, very quiet. There were people about, predominantly pensioners, presumably on a day’s excursion. Sitting on seats, drinking tea. We walked by – we were heading for the former railway station (closed in 1917) where a cache was hidden. The station and the former railway line was marked by a wonderful sculpture/mural. We initially thought the cache was attached to it, but a closer inspection of a nearby seat yielded our prize.

Then it all went wrong.

We had got hot at the glass factory, and the day was heating up to…frying our brains. (Leastways that is our excuse). Our last cache was a multi. All we had to do was collect a year from a plaque by the Lifeboat Station and undertake some very simple maths to calculate the coordinates for the final cache. One of the numbers meant multiplying 2 by 2. A child of 5 could do this. We didn’t have a child of 5 with us, just slowly frying brains. For some reason…we made the answer 8 ! (To this day, we don’t know why. We both checked it and the answer was 8).

Off we went, up a very steep hill arriving at a field boundary next to a telegraph pole. The hint, alluded to such a pole, but as we still had some way to go (to our erroneous coordinates), we didn’t check the pole. We stared field-ward. The gate was locked, and no poles anywhere to be seen. After some minutes, we moved back to the car and drove to Westward Ho! still wondering what went wrong.

(Postscript : it was late that evening we re-checked the maths, and realised the pole we had stood next to, was the host! We were within feet of the cache and didn’t look! Oh dear!)

Westward Ho!

By contrast to the quiet, sleepy nature of Appledore – Westward Ho! was vibrant, noisy and the average age must have dropped by 70 years. Car parks were full (it took us 5 circuits of a car park to get a space, which tested Mr Hg137’s parking ability to the full – remember he can’t multiply 2 x 2 – so how on earth can he park a car?!)

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We walked away from the hustle and bustle to collect 3 caches. Two were puzzles we had solved before leaving home (suffice to say three words had been highlighted in each of the cache descriptions which provided a unique method of location identification). The other cache celebrated a famous author. Surprisingly, not Charles Kingsley (author of Westward Ho!), but Rudyard Kipling who attended the United Services College in the Town Centre. (The cache was called Stalky and Co, named after the book written by Kipling based on his experiences at the college).

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We strode back to the sea front, and to the North-East of the main beach is a protective bank of pebbles. This protects the sand-dunes of Northam Burrows from the sea. The bank and the pebbles formed the basis of an Earthcache. We took various readings of heights, stone shapes and provided answers as to how the pebbles moved. (Proving we can do geography exams, but we can’t do maths questions!)

Our main target in Westward Ho! was the swimming pool. A tidal swimming pool. With the tide coming in, the pool would be submerged, and unswimmable in less than 2 hours. We returned to the car, and noticed….Mr Hg137 had left his swimming costume in the hotel ! (Can’t do maths, can’t carry a bag out of the hotel…)

Mrs Hg137 changed into her costume (the awkward car parking space provided surprising privacy). Mr Hg137 hatched a plan. His walking trousers were convertible. A knee-high zip would undo the bottom leg portion. So he could swim after all – in slightly too long shorts.

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We arrived at the pool – surprisingly cool, and swam, waded and eventually watched the incoming tide splashing against nearby rocks. These splashes became more frequent and we knew our time in the pool was over.

An exhausting day where we learnt about glass-blowing, tested our geography skills but went to the bottom of the class in Maths !

PS We learnt punctuation too…Westward Ho! is the only place in Britain which contains an exclamation mark!

Caches found :

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September 5 : Trackable : Smiley Bee

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Smiley Bee

On a super, warm sunny Sunday in glorious Devon, we came upon the Smiley Bee trackable in one of the caches in a series around Baggy Point, near Croyde.    While there, the bee had a wonderful view from the South West Coast Path across the long golden sweep of Woolacombe sands.

Its mission is below.   So far, it hasn’t progressed very far, but we will move it onwards.

…”Hello – I would like to travel to as many countries as possible – please don’t keep me.  I know Smiley Bees are CUTE, but I was born to explore the world.  My owner has been lucky enough to live all over the planet and wants to keep traveling – virtually through you.”…

Smiley Bee in Devon

It started off in August 2020, on the border of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, and has spent the time since then travelling around England.   It’s only travelled about 400 miles in that time, and didn’t move anywhere at all between September 2020 and April 2021, which is probably the effect of various lockdowns.   It spent the winter in a cache near Burbage Common, on the southern edge of Leicestershire.   After a very brief visit to the London area, it moved straight on to Croyde in Devon, where we found it.   Interestingly (for me, anyway), I lived a short distance from Burbage Common for most of my life, and then found the trackable a short distance from the location of my only childhood holiday in Devon, so there are coincidences there …

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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September 4 : Bideford

Our first full day on our mini-staycation in Devon was a busy one.

Bideford

In the morning we undertook a non-geocaching activity (!) and visited the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Rosemoor. As one might expect the gardens were full of late-Summer vibrant colours and the Autumnal vegetables were looking good too.

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RHS Rosemoor

We left early afternoon and headed for Bideford, a small fishing town on the River Torridge.

There were quite a few caches in Bideford and the neighbouring town of Northam. These included 2 long multis. Both were centred around the Town Centre and the river, and we decided to attempt just one of them, the Bideford Heritage Walk. (Both multis criss-crossed each other at regular intervals, and we have a very poor track record of undertaking two similar multis simultaneously).

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We parked next to the Town Bridge, which was the start of the multi. In the middle of the bridge was a plaque stating when it was rebuilt. We wrote down the date and moved on to collect numbers from various buildings in the older part of town. We climbed the steep steps away from the river and arrived at the Town Centre.

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It was a Saturday afternoon, and the shops and market were busy-ish. The pictures below show empty streets, but they don’t show how long we waited for people to move out of shot!

The Town Centre boasts a good mix of national chains and independents. Some of the shops, the churches and other buildings had interesting histories, which formed answers to a couple of multi-cache questions.

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We headed back to the river and further downstream to the Museum; here we found a French post box – another number jotted down. We then discovered our last two numbers were much closer to the start. The day was hot and we paused to admire the busy park. A musician played to an appreciative audience, children played on the nearby swings and climbing frames.

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We stopped and enjoyed an ice-cream. The day was hot, and despite wandering around the town for some time…we hadn’t found a cache. We glanced at our GPS, we were 400 yards away from one, sadly in the wrong direction! But, refreshed by our ice-cream we headed away from our multi, and to a slipway where the cache was hidden. We arrived just a dinghy was being launched, but compared to the hustle and bustle of the town centre, this location was quiet. Except that is from the neighbouring football ground of Bideford Town FC, who scored while we were are GZ !

We walked back along the river, passing our car, and crossing the bridge to collect the final 2 numbers for our multi-cache. One was on a statue, the other was in a former railway station. The former railway line that went through Bideford is now part of the Tarka Trail, a 180 mile figure-of-eight loop based on the journey(s) made by Tarka the Otter, in Gavin Williamson’s book.

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Tarka Trail

As we wrote down the last multi-stage number, Mr Hg137 thought there was a cache nearby. Indeed there it was, practically visible from where we were calculating the multi-cache co-ordinates. Unfortunately it was wedged behind a sign, and it took some minutes to extricate it!

The final for the multi-cache seemed some distance away, and we weren’t entirely sure of the optimum route. So we continued along the Tarka Trail heading to another standard cache…conveniently passing the final to the multi-cache on route ! This was exceedingly cleverly hidden (it took us ages, and after a long walk around the town we were determined to find it!). The last cache of the day, Tarka Trail – Kynock was hidden in a prickly bramble bush, so a painful end to half-day’s caching in Bideford.

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Caches found

September 3 : Barnstaple

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Friday afternoon, and we’d arrived in Barnstaple, where we would be staying for a few days, seeing the sights, going to the beach and – of course – doing a bit of caching. Having checked into our hotel, the local Premier Inn, we went off to the town for a walk and some caching.

We started from the Seven Brethren car park.  The name commemorates the burial place of a family who died from the plague in 1646 after recovering a floating bundle of contaminated bedding from the river, and who were buried on the riverbank on the other side of the river from the town to avoid contamination.

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To give ourselves a walking tour of the town, and see some of the ‘best bits’, our first cache was the Barnstaple Heritage Trail, an eight (!) stage multicache.   With many stages, there were also many ways we could make a mistake, so we did some extensive Google research beforehand, and thought we knew where the final location was, and it turned out we were correct. Sort of in reverse (normally you find the clues, then find the cache, but we did it the other way round) we then walked into town and visited a good number of the waypoint locations.

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The area around the car park is a retail/leisure park with a selection of superstores, DIY outlets and sports facilities.   Our next cache was close to one of those DIY stores.   As we weren’t familiar with the area, we set off from the car park in hope, and by following the GPS and paths that went in the right direction, found ourselves in the correct place with a second cache find.

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After this success, we followed the GPS through a maze of trails, including the Macmillan Way West ,  Tarka Trail and the South West Coast Path , which led us to a stone and plaque marking the opening of the Barnstaple Western Bypass. Having found the adjacent cache, we turned our attention to the plaque, which seemed to have been defaced.  We wondered why?  More research followed, and the serious misdemeanour answer is here. And, as for the roundabout at the start of the bypass, that is also a source of contention – the stones in the centre of the roundabout come from Cornwall, not Devon, and the locals are not happy about that!

Barnstaple Long Bridge

Finally, we walked back across Barnstaple Long Bridge and onward to Rock Park .   It’s named after W F Rock, who donated the land.   However, there are just a few rocks, and one conceals a cache, ‘Ready to Rocks’.   Yes, it’s under a rock.   We found some likely rocks and started looking, but not one looked as if anything could be hidden in, on, or underneath it.  We looked again, from a different angle, and a small part of something ‘out of place’ could be glimpsed. Got it!

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So that was us done for the day; we use geocaching as a good way to get an overview of an area and see interesting places – not necessarily always on the tourist trail – and that’s how it had been today. We’d done death, crimes, travel, history, and much, much more – a great start to a weekend!

July 13 : Mega Devon 2017 Trackable Tag

We discovered this trackable in the Wombles Signature Cache.

In fact there were two other trackables in the cache, and we were spoilt for choice. Which should we take ? Should we take all 3 ? In the end we decided to take this trackable for 2 reasons – it was the smallest (and therefore easiest to hide in a cache), and we had been to the Devon Mega last year – and really enjoyed it!

The Devon Mega had taken place early August 2017 at Bicton Park near Otterton and we had spent a couple of days caching both on our own and following the hundreds of cachers from cache to cache.

Bicton Park – home of 2017 Devon Mega

The trackable we found was used to promote the event and started its journey nearly 18 months ago. It was initially placed in a cache near Princeton on Dartmoor. There it remained for 2 months, unfound, but then got discovered and visited various caches in Devon and Cornwall (Including Bude, Sennen Cove near Land’s End, and Combe Martin about halfway between Ilfracombe and Lynton.) It had one objective to attend the Devon Mega in August.

Did it achieve its objective ?

Sadly no.

In mid July 2017, it had been placed in a cache in Dartmoor – close to where it started – but sadly it stayed there for a month and missed the Mega! Thereafter the trackable stayed in the West Country with two exceptions, brief trips to Northern France and Turkey! This return journey to Turkey added nearly 4000 miles to its distance – which is the majority of its 5300 miles it has so far travelled.

One other interesting fact about the tag was that it was initially found by cacher ‘Chudleigh Traveller’ who enjoyed its company for its first month (before placing it in a cache in May 2017). Chudleigh Traveller re-found the trackable at an cacher’s meet in November 2017, and again took it caching for a few weeks. Amazingly Chudleigh Traveller found the tag a third time in March 2018, and once again, a few weeks later placed it in a cache – this time the Wombles Signature cache, where it has been for the last few months.

We can’t promise to take you to Devon, little tag… but we will move you on soon!

August 6, UK Mega, Devon, Honiton

Throughout our weekend at the Mega we had stayed in a hotel in Honiton, but we hadn’t found a cache in Honiton itself!

Today we would put that right! Honiton is historically famous for knotted lace making and the eight caches we were going to attempt almost had us in knots.

Sunday Morning in Honiton

There were three caches within walking distance of the hotel, so we attacked these before driving to the town centre. The first was a Travel Bug Hotel, set just off the A30, next to a real trucker’s stop. Not an official service station, but a couple of vans served food, and another provided a loo stop. Nearby was a pleasant copse, and it was on the edge of this copse that the cache was hidden. Our GPS went wild under the tree cover so a covert detailed search took place. Well, as covert, as we could be, as several people stood outside of their vehicles smoking and supping coffee. Eventually we found the Travel Bug Hotel and in a very well crafted wooden container seemingly part of a tree stump. we dropped off the M&S Wedding trackable that we had in our possession.

We struggled with the next cache (Mad Meany’s Wedding Cache) so much that we decided that after 15 minutes fruitless searching to abandon and go looking for cache 3. Cache 3 (Not Connected) was our easiest Honiton find of the day. It was attached to a lamp post and made to look like some electrical circuitry – excellently hidden in plain sight.

We returned to Mad Meany’s Wedding Cache, and of course found the cache almost immediately. How we missed the magnetic nano on our first pass we still don’t know. Still three caches down… five to go.

It was a Sunday, and Honiton Town Centre was relatively quiet. A few people out buying papers, going to Church, window shopping. Three of our targets in the Town Centre were multis. Regular readers of this blog will know we occasionally fail with multis so this was a big challenge.

Especially as the first multi (Historical Honiton) had 11 (ELEVEN) pieces of information to find. We had to walk up and down Honiton’s High Street and collect numbers and dates from various buildings in the Town Centre.

High Street, Honiton

We learnt that not only is Honiton is famous for lace, but pottery too. There was a Great Fire and William III stayed in the town on his travels. The co-ordinates for multis can sometimes be entered directly into a GPS, but with 11 numbers we resorted to pen and paper. (High tech finding in Honiton!)

Part way through collecting the 11 numbers we needed, we arrived at the start of our second multi (Church Micro 6449 Honiton St Pauls). Here we had to find words on Honiton’s War Memorial, translate the word lengths to numbers and hence to co-ordinates. We discovered that the final was further down the High Street (another sheet of paper) so we continued to collect the Historical Honiton numbers on our way.

Multi-cache number 3 starts here!

We were reaching the end of our collection when we reached the start point for our third multi (A Fine Pair #470 Honiton). Here the numbers were calculated from the phone box and to our surprise the final destination was yards from where we were standing. So our first multi found, was the last one we started. (No paper needed! – Hurrah!)

We continued collecting more of the Historical Honiton numbers until we arrived at the final destination for Church Micro. We put away one piece of paper, retrieved another, read our notes for the Church Micro and made an easy find.

Of course we still hadn’t quite got all the co-ordinates for the Historical Honiton and after a few more minutes, we had them all. The final hiding place was 2 miles out of town! So, the now-slightly-ragged piece of paper with our notes was filed away (again).

We had two standard caches to find in Honiton – one near the station (Side Tracked Honiton). Our retrieval of this was made harder as we tried following the compass direction and not the main roads! Eventually we arrived and found the magnetic container.

Then a standard cache with an adventure! Splash & Cache involved us walking into a park, Mr Hg137 lowering himself down a slightly slippery bank into a stream and walking ankle deep along it. Ducking under trees until a small weir was reached.

In the stream, under the trees

Water, water, everywhere…now where’s the cache?

Descending the weir the water was now knee deep, cool but not too fast moving. But where was the cache ? The compass pointed to a upward sloping drainage channel … really up there ?

The drainage channel was slippery but soon the cache was located, head height. Held in with clips, it was difficult to extract and even harder to put back! (The cache had a difficulty rating of 3, and a terrain rating of 3.5)
It probably took 10 minutes to locate the cache, but Mrs Hg137 was getting a wee bit anxious while she waited in the park. A fun adventure for Mr Hg137!

Our drive home from Honiton, was via our last uncollected multi-cache (Historical Honiton). We parked up in a layby, walked 60 yards and grovelled in a hedge for a few minutes. A straightforward find, after a less-than-straightforward morning which had our caching brains tied up in knots!

A final look at Honiton

August 5 : What is the City?

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

We found this trackable while caching in the afternoon during the UK Mega event at Bicton College, Devon. “Found” is a bit of a misnomer – “What is the City?” has handed to us by another cacher, The Haywood Hornet. He is an incredibly experienced cacher, we are but beginners by comparison (he’s been caching since 2003, has found over 38,000 caches, we’ve just scraped over the 2,000 milestone, and finds as many caches most months as we find in a year).

Having got the trackable, we spotted the poem that was attached to it and have done a bit of research. The poem was written for Creative50, an artistic event associated with Manchester International Festival 2017:
“This poem was written as a Creative50 response to the opening event of Manchester International Festival 2017: ‘What is the city but the people?’. It celebrates Manchester’s hidden treasures – its residents – and their devotion to their city. 28 places in Manchester have been hidden inside the text of the poem and copies of the poem have been hidden around the city in geocaches.”

Here are links to videos about the poet:
http://creative50.mif.co.uk/people/cathy-wilcock
and of the poem – which is a very neat celebration of the many districts of Manchester:
http://creative50.mif.co.uk/the-city-and-the-people

August 5 : UK Mega 2017, Devon – Day 2, Bicton Park

Note : the following blog contains many pictures of people. If you are identifiable in a picture, and want to be removed from the blog/picture, please request this in the comments section.

The 2017 Mega had arrived.

Actually the UK Mega event had been going on all week. Many hundreds of geocachers had camped at Bicton College, just outside of Otterton, for many days and had taken part on a variety of activities including letter-boxing on Dartmoor, and early morning swim and lots of local trips and excursions.

Bicton College

But Saturday was the big day. The day, when people like us, would attend for one day only. And nearly 2000 people did too!

Lots of cachers!

A giant convoy slowly drove into Bicton College passing the huge camping site. Lots of large tents, small tents, campervans. Somehow we squeezed into a car park space and walked, to the main building. Without really trying, and despite arriving at 9:50, we found ourselves pretty close to the front as the Mega doors opened. A local towncrier pronounced the event ‘Open’ and with that Signal the Frog welcomed everyone.

From Town Crier…

…to Signal the Frog

Inside the Bicton Park building were a variety of stall holders, and we were first at the Garmin stand to find out what went wrong the previous day. It seems that may have been a ‘duff’ cache which caused the problem, but with over 70 caches loaded its difficult to work out which it was.

Other exhibitors included Aberdeen Geocachers selling wares for their Mega in 2019, various stands selling geocache containers and trackables, a demonstration of http://www.project-gc.com and also UK Cache Mag.

UK Cache Mag

Buy your caches here!

We’ve met Adam, the editor, a few times, and he asked us to take a few photos for the magazine. We were able to help him, and we were really pleased that several of our photos appeared in the latest issue.

Outside there was also a hive of activity. 10 lab caches had been set up.

These were short ‘games’ – perhaps solving a mini-jigsaw, decoding a series of flags, hanging up some ‘washing’ or tipping water into pipes with a large number of drainage holes. As each activity was completed the name of a previous Mega location was spelt out. (Or at least spelt, similar to, a Mega location. Many of the Os had become zeroes, many of the Is had become 1s, many of the Ls had become (s. ). To claim the lab cache one had to enter the answer online. We solved 9 out 10, failing only on the puzzle which required a QR code reader which we did not have on our phone. Great fun!

Keep pouring!

Washing Day!

Piecing it together!

A marquee on the campsite had activities going on in the day, including lock-picking!
With hindsight we should have taken a look in the marquee, but somehow it slipped off our radar.

We instead undertook some of the geocaches laid out near the site. Many of these had been undertaken by those camping all week, but it gave a set of close-by caches for the day visitors too.

2 series caught our eye : an Animal series and a Roadside Rubbish series. Between them they formed a circular trip of just under 20 caches.

Where have all the cachers gone ?

Caching at a Mega event is easy. Stand roughly near a cache site, and someone will soon arrive and find the cache with you. Surprisingly though we did have several caches to find and replace on our own. Some times we struggled and another cacher would appear from nowhere, stick their hand in a bush and retrieve the cache seemingly without trying.

At one cache, “Lizard”, probably 20 cachers were gently fondling tree roots desperately trying to find an elusive toy. (As it turned out, the toy Lizard had been replaced by a Tupperware container).

Where’s the Lizard ?

The caches in both the Roadside Rubbish and Animal series were imaginative. Toys were predominantly used for the Animal series – though the porcelain cat was a scary exception.

The ‘rubbish’ containers were cats’eyes (how they were acquired we still don’t know), number plates, plastic bottles and most unexpectedly a small plastic dustbin!

The only exception to the Rubbish and Animal series was a wooden box (similar to, if not made by, local Berkshire cacher, JJEF). We arrived at this cache with another pair of cachers who performed the appropriate magnetic trick with a coin.

We found all the caches we attempted on the circuit and arrived back at Bicton College as the closing ceremony approached. Drum Majorettes were performing, a presentation to the next UK Mega (Yorkshire 2018) took place, and the Geocaching awards took place in the evening. We were really pleased to see that Washknight – See blogroll left for his blog – won in the Special Caching Achievement Award category.

Well done to him, and well done to all the organisers of the Devon Mega – a truly fantastic event.

August 4 : UK Mega 2017, Devon – Day 1, Otterton, Ladram Bay and elsewhere

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

I had finally been permitted a day off work. So, bright and early, we were heading down the A303 towards Devon, towards the 2017 UK Mega Geocaching event at Bicton College.

Close by Bicton College lies the River Otter, Otterton village and Ladram Bay, with its red cliffs and sandstone stacks. The bay is one of my favourite places – ever, ever – we last visited in May 2016 and posted about the caches then. But, for the Mega event, LOTS of new caches had been placed and we planned to do quite a few of them.

Jurassic Coast

We parked in Otterton and switched on the GPS. Mr Hg137 had spent several hours loading up 76 caches for the weekend and we were fully prepared. The GPS fired up … and there were just two (yes, two) caches visible. Aargghh! Something had gone wrong, and we didn’t have a caching route for today, or the rest of the weekend. We thought … how to load some more caches … we had a GPS, we had a laptop, where to find some wifi? Aha! The village pub. We grabbed GPS, laptop and cable, and rushed to the village pub, the Kings Arms http://www.kingsarmsotterton.co.uk where we bought a drink, asked for the wifi password and sat outside, loading caches. The village seemed to be quite busy, and suspiciously many of the folk wandering around seemed to be carrying GPSs. Hmm, a lot of geocachers about!

Mission accomplished, we walked back to the start of our day’s caching route which would lead us out of Otterton, over tracks to Ladram Bay, then up Peak Hill for a view across to Sidmouth, then back along a green lane to the village. We would usually have parked at the car park at Ladram Bay, but the price for doing this has risen to a rip off price of £10, and that is way, way too much for an afternoon’s parking. Oh well, another customer lost forever.

Slippery, slidy path down to the bay

Our first couple of caches were from the ‘Strolling around Otterton’ series which had been recently placed, ready for the Mega event. Mr Hg137 became confused when one of the hints read ‘behind TP’ and he spent a little while looking for a tepee rather than a telegraph pole. Never mind, he worked it out soon enough. Then we left the village and walked towards the coast along a muddy, sunken lane leading downhill towards the bay. We had joined the route of the ‘Mega Byways’ series and found some more caches as we slipped and slid and eventually emerged into Ladram Bay Holiday Park.

Ladram Bay

The South West Coast Path crosses here, and we joined it to walk up the hill to the east of the bay, pausing for lunch at a picnic bench overlooking the beach. Here’s a video of the super little bay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9e5nTQvGgY
As we set off uphill away from the bay, we stopped to read a noticeboard, and for a chat to two people coming from the other direction. Their GPS gave them away as geocachers. They were Lydford Locators, and we found more than 50 of their caches as we worked our way down the upper reaches of the Thames in early 2015. We were duly awed to meet them and they were … puzzled by us two fans.

We carried on up the hill on a path between the cliff edge and a cornfield, finding caches as we went. We recognised another geocacher, Simply Paul, who we had last seen at the 2016 Geolympix in Ashridge Forest. And we kept spotting people behaving oddly, stopping at regular intervals or disappearing into hedges and bushes. Cachers, cachers everywhere! (Goodness knows what the locals and muggles made of all this ….)

Peak Hill, Devon: view west

We reached the top edge of the field and went into woodland, then spent a little while searching around in ivy before finding our next cache. All the time a family were approaching up the hill, and we just managed to replace the cache before they arrived. Hello to caching family, BECKS RLLR plus geodog, and we kept on bumping into them for the next mile or so. Leaving them to look for the cache we had just re-hidden, we huffed and puffed our way to the very top of the hill, 157 metres above sea level, leaving the woods for heathland and for a fine view out to sea. A short way further on, the south-west coast path began to drop towards Sidmouth, and the view opened out.

SWCP Panorama

Mr Hg137 suddenly realised that there was a cache, named ‘SWCP Panorama’, that he had omitted to load during our earlier, rushed episode at the pub. He cast around like a bloodhound on a scent, and the cache was soon found. It was under a pile of large pebbles that looked as if they had been regularly disturbed – that’s the thing about Mega events, the caches are found a lot in a short time, and there are usually signs of searching, or even a cacher holding the cache!

Bars Lane, Otterton

We turned back inland and down Bars Lane, a sunken tree-lines track which turned into a lane, and with a few stops for cache finding and a few diversions down side paths for more cache finding, we made our way back to Otterton. As we reached the cache where Mr Hg137 had searched earlier for a tepee, we bumped into yet another group of cachers – this group were clearly from Scotland and they were the organising committee for the 2019 Mega event, which is to be in Ayrshire. So many cachers!

Arriving back at the car, we decided to attempt one more cache. This one was called ‘Spoiler’. You get some coordinates as a start point, are told that the cache is within a two-mile radius, and are given a photo taken from the cache site. And that is all the information you get. We’d done one of these before, in London’s Docklands, and hours, days and weeks of research had gone on to find the right place. This one was a bit easier. We knew that the cache was inside a circle based on given coordinates – we drew a circle on the map. We perused likely places using every kind of online map – and got a few candidate places. We researched further – bingo! Mr Hg137 found some drone footage. We had found the place. We drove there, down some very narrow Devon lanes. Walking round the location, we found the cache at the third attempt, when we had finally managed to line up the photo and the view exactly. Phew! Success. We headed off to Honiton and our hotel, to rest up, load some more caches, and prepare for the rigours of the Mega Day on the morrow.

A secret location somewhere in Devon!

Here are just some of the many caches we found: