August 3 part 2 : Naunton

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here again.

The Black Horse, Naunton

Our journey home from our weekend in and around Bourton on the Water started with a short drive to Naunton, a small village further up the River Windrush. I used to go on holiday here as a teenager, staying in the farmhouse adjacent to the Black Horse pub https://theblackhorsenaunton.co.uk/ Farmhouse, village, and pub have changed little in the last few decades – even the design on the pub sign is the same, though the car park has now become a beer garden, and the village shop is now a house.

St Andrews Church, Naunton

We walked through the village, crossed the river, and reached a small green by the village church, St Andrews. There’s an ingeniously hidden Church Micro cache here, so we spent a few minutes working out where it was, then had a picnic lunch on a millennium bench on the green. After a quick look inside the church, we returned along a grassy path close to the river, following the Warden’s Way, which links the Oxfordshire Way at Bourton and the Cotswold Way at Winchcombe https://www.ldwa.org.uk/ldp/members/show_path.php?path_name=Wardens%27++Way

A footbridge took us back across the River Windrush, and close by on one side is another cache, ‘Pooh Sticks’; the cache is next to the bridge, and quite close to the water. It hadn’t been found for a couple of months and we weren’t sure if it was still there, but it was bravely retrieved by Mr Hg137, who emerged from the undergrowth with only a few nettle stings and scratches.

Naunton Dovecote

Inside Naunton Dovecote

Also close to the river, in a little field, is a dovecote. There is a dovecote trust but I couldn’t find a website. Anyway, the dovecote was built around 1660, has had a variety of uses – as a mill, and animal stabling, apart from the obvious. But now it is back to housing doves, and it had cooing residents in some of its 903 nestholes when we looked inside.

Naunton Cricket Pitch – the outfield is a little long!

We had one more cache to find, ‘Naunton Cricket Field’. But where was the cricket field and how could we get to it? After a little aimless wandering, we found our way around the back of the village hall and up a slope onto the cricket field. There’s been no play here for a bit and the outfield is a bit long! The cache was hidden at the edge of the pitch in a bit of cricket ‘furniture’.

Naunton – my teenage holiday destination

As we returned to the geocars, I mused on my memories of my holidays in Naunton long ago. The village looks so similar, and pub, and its sign, look much the same, but the sign must have been repainted or replaced, surely?. But I don’t recall visiting the church or the dovecote, and didn’t even know about the cricket pitch and the village hall, assuming they were there at the time. We used to stay in a farmhouse owned by the Hanks, next to the pub, and I noticed the same surname cropping up on the cricket club website, so maybe there is a family connection there. Mmm, much to think on as we started our journey home.

Here are some caches we found:

August 3 part 1 : Bourton on the Water

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Our long weekend in the Cotswolds was over, and we packed up, ready to depart. But, after breakfast and before setting off, we went for a caching walk around Bourton. The village had been packed at the weekend and we hoped it would be less busy early on a Monday morning. And it was.

Harrington House, Bourton on the Water

We had been staying at Harrington House and we left the geocars there (with permission – cheaper!), crossed the road, and followed the Windrush Way between houses https://www.ldwa.org.uk/ldp/members/show_path.php?path_name=Windrush+Way The path suddenly came out from between the close-packed village houses and onto the riverside, a lovely little spot. It was also a hiding place for a cache, ‘Hole in the Wall’, which had only been placed at the end of June; we think this is the youngest cache we’ve found (so far).

Our remaining caches were all from the ‘Bourton On The Water’ series. We had mixed success, as in we attempted four, and found one. Bourton is a very busy and popular place and caches set here go missing very regularly; but we were still disappointed. And, while we made our only find, we were discovered by a (very poshly and politely spoken) muggle, who asked what we were doing. The cache was on HER property, and she didn’t know about it. We showed her the cache and the log, explained about geocaching, and we hope she was happy.

Part way round our non-cache-finding segment, we broke off from the caching, and did our one touristy thing of the week – the Dragonfly Maze https://www.bourtoninfo.com/attractions/dragonfly-maze/ We like mazes, so we would have come here anyway, but it did help that it wasn’t necessary to book in advance (a necessary/annoying, post-pandemic thing), it was outdoors, and numbers were controlled by pausing admission once the maze was full (23 people!). It’s a traditional hedge maze, but with a twist: there are clues to collect around the maze which help with the unveiling of something at the centre of the maze. We were in the queue ten minutes before opening time, and second party through the gate. But we were first to the centre of the maze, and solved the puzzle! We unveiled the solution, and left, providing a few clues to the family following us; they were first through the gate, but we got the solution first; we saw them later on in the village and they solved the puzzle too.

And that was Bourton: we returned to the geocars and drove away.

One cache we found:

August 2 : Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat, the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Adlestrop, immortalised by the poet Edward Thomas. The poem is based on a journey Thomas took in June 1914. He wrote the poem some months later, and has come to symbolise the peacefulness and tranquility prior to World War I. The poem was never published in Thomas’ lifetime, he was killed in 1917 shortly before an anthology, called Poems was due for publication.

Adlestrop no longer has a railway station (closed in 1966), but the station still lives on, in the form of the poem and the shelter/seat/name which is now sited in the village centre.

The shelter also hosts the poem on its seat, a geocache, and for us a relatively quick find.

Adlestrop doesn’t have the same look-and-feel as other Cotswold villages. The stones are slightly darker, the minor roads criss-cross the village but the major A roads completely bypass the village.

St Mary Magdelene Church stands proudly a little walk away from the Adlestrop Railway Shelter. The church has a 13th chancel but most other parts of the church have been built or rebuilt over the centuries. Just inside the graveyard was something very modern, and formed the first part of the Church Micro multicache.

How many graveyards have one of these ?

We extracted the information and extra details from a nearby churchyard seat. The co-ordinates took us a little out of the village, to a footpath by a large bush. Somewhere in the bush was the cache. Luckily we found the cache relatively quickly.

Then tiredness set in.

Around Adlestrop is an 11 cache series. We didn’t have time to undertake all 11, so decided to attempt number 1, then cut across some footpaths arriving at caches 10 and 11. That was the plan, and in fairness we achieved the plan. But we would have earned few marks in the plan’s execution.

Village Water Supply until the mid 1950s

Cache 1 of the Adlestrop Amble was in a ribbon of woodland adjacent to a minor road. We ignored the footpath sign which pointed into the woodland (for some reason we thought the footpath sign pointed the wrong way into the copse – leastways that’s our excuse and we are sticking by it). When we arrived parallel with the cache we then had to undertake some minor bushwhacking to enter the woodland to find the cache. An easy find, but poor footpath finding.

Our short-cut to Cache 10 was unnerving. We had to walk up a private drive. Were we trespassing ? We felt much better once we saw a footpath leading away from the drive and into a paddock area. We arrived at a footpath (or so we thought) and soon discovered this was a path to a farm.

We retraced our steps, and worked out a route to cache 10. We walked along the Macmillan Way passing an unusual ridge and furrow field. Ridge and Furrow was a means of ploughing and land management from about the 5th to 17th centuries. The Ridges rise like waves on the sea, and furrows are the dips between the waves. Usually complete fields have parallel waves across them, but this particular field had ridges and furrows in one direction for half the field and the other half the ridges and furrows were turned through 90 degrees.

Cache 10 was by a gate, and it took us some time to find. Cache 11 took us a lot longer.

At Cache 11, the GPS didn’t settle and the hint ‘top of hedge’ didn’t help when the hedge had grown to 12 feet high. We could approach the hedge from 2 directions, and it was from one of these that Mrs Hg137 saw the cache…but couldn’t reach it. Mr Hg137 leant in from the other direction, avoiding some but not all, of the protective nettles, gorse and bramble. The vegetation meant he couldn’t see the cache and was totally reliant on Mrs Hg137’s expert instructions.

Cache retrieved and signed, we admired our scratches and returned to our car having found 5 caches and explored this poetic village.

August 2 : Snowshill

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Snowshill is a small and pretty village in the Cotswolds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowshill with a National Trust property, Snowshill Manor. The owner of the Manor, Charles Wade, was a tad eccentric, living in a small cottage while filling his manor with an eclectic selection of collections (I remember a room of bicycles and another dark scary one filled with samurai armour). Anyway, we weren’t visiting, the house wasn’t open, only the gardens, but it was still likely to be popular, so we arrived early and parked in the small village car park. It was filling already, many of the cars with Lycra-clad cyclists unloading bikes from roof racks, ready for a ride in the country.

Snowshill church …

… and the village pub

It wasn’t far to the village green, with the church on one side, the Snowshill Arms http://snowshillarms.co.uk/ on another and the gates to the Manor close by. There are four caches based in the centre of the village, and we decided to do these first before setting out on our caching circuit/country walk, as the arithmetic needed to find the coordinates for multicaches is easier when you are fresh! ‘Snowshill Calling……’ was the first, based on a (still operational) phone box, then we sat on a handy seat on the green to work out the coordinates for the other three caches. Two of they lay in roughly the same direction, uphill out of the village (many of the ways out of the village lead uphill, so that’s not much of a clue!), and, as it’s a very small village, we were soon out in the country, searching, with mixed success, finding one and not finding the other, which has since been marked as missing.

Back down the hill. we found the fourth and last of our ‘starter’ caches and passed the small village car park, which was now full … and the National Trust car park was also filling fast. We were following the SN series ( aka Snowshill or Summer Nights series); there are nine caches in the series, with handy names like ‘Hinge’, ‘Tree Hole’, ‘Vista’, ‘Branch’ which give handy clues to the locations where the caches can be found. First of all, we followed the Winchcombe Way https://www.ldwa.org.uk/ldp/members/show_path.php?path_name=Winchcombe+Way downhill into fields, then crossed a small stream where a family were splashing about, oblivious to our caching activities. Next came a warm, steep climb through woods and along the edge of fields, before reaching a lane which contoured along the hillside, with great views (a vista!) back to Snowshill across the valley. There were many walkers, all out enjoying the sunshine, and many of our cache searches started with a pause to let a group of people go by.


Lunchtime was approaching, and we sought out a spot in the shade to eat our picnic lunch and to watch the steady stream of muggle walkers and muggle dogs passing by. After that, we started the return leg, back across the valley to Snowshill. After a steep downhill (to match that steep uphill earlier on) we followed a shaded track which went past a fishing lake and then started uphill, again. Along here somewhere is the most notable cache in the series, an ammo can: there are not very many of these about, as they are large and not the easiest to hide, but they last very well indeed and quite a few of the oldest caches are ammo cans.

The uphill track emerged onto a road, and we were suddenly back in Snowshill, not far from the village green where we had started. But there was no chance to sit on the seat on the green now, it was well filled with cyclists enjoying a drink from the pub over the road, and lots of other folk were out too, walking around the village and enjoying the summer. We made our way back to the geocar, in a full car park; as we left our space was immediately claimed.

Here are some of the caches we found:

August 1 : Cotswold Way Chipping Campden to Broadway

For our first full day’s walking in the Cotswolds we would undertake the first 5 miles of the Cotswold Way. The Cotswold Way is a 100 long distance footpath starting in Chipping Campden and finishing in Bath.

The day didn’t start well. We had driven some miles from our hotel base in Bourton-on-the-Water to Broadway to park our destination car, and then we couldn’t find the GPS. It should have been in Mr Hg137’s haversack so we searched that. Nothing. We decided it must be back at the hotel, so we drove back to Bourton (in the car we were going to leave a Chipping Campden). We searched our bedroom, the car park and all places in between. We re-searched the haversack.. and found the GPS ! Grateful for finding GPS but annoyed at our stupidity.. if we couldn’t find a bright yellow GPS in a haversack what chance had we finding geocaches!

So, about 90 minutes later than intended we started our walk from Chipping Campden. (We parked in a road called ‘Back Ends’ which Mrs Hg137 believes is the only such road name in the country… unless of course you know different !)
In these 90 minutes, the temperature had risen quite appreciably, and with a 250 foot ascent to start our walk, we decided to postpone it further by locating our first geocache of the day; a nearby Church Micro.

St Catherine’s, Chipping Campden

A relatively quick find.

Then the ascent.

Nearly at the top!

Our energy levels weren’t high after the trauma of the morning and the exertions of the previous day’s walk. We were passed on the climb by several groups of people, dogs and children. The ascent was worth it! We were rewarded with fine views over the Vale of Evesham from both the trig point and a toposcope.

Dover’s Hill Trig Point

There was a multi based on these two features, but after some calculations we realised the final meant retracing our steps some distance, so we moved on.

Toposcope Number 1

The top of Dover’s Hill was the site of the Cotswold Olimpicks held on the Thursday and Friday after Whitsun from 1612. The events included wrestling,leaping,dancing,pitching the bar,leapfrog and walking on the hands,together with the peculiar Cotswold pastimes of singlestick fighting and shin kicking. As this weekend should have been the start of the (postponed) Tokyo Olympics – this all seemed rather apt.

Our next successful find celebrated the Cotswold Olimpians, and we celebrated too as we had finished climbing! This was a letterbox cache, and had an unusual twist.

Is this a letterbox cache ?

Our route then followed, albeit on footpaths, Mile Drive. Mrs Hg137 had walked this section of the Cotswold Way before, and remembered it wasn’t the most scenic. In the context of 100 mile footpath with lavish views, Mile Drive could never be described as a highlight, but as a tranquil, wide area of grassland (great for social distancing) it ticked a few boxes.

Mile Drive

We found three caches along Mile Drive; we also failed to find the first stage of a three part multi!

The Cotswold Way was relatively busy, and we found ourselves behind a slowish group of walkers. Just as we caught them up, we paused for a cache, they walked on, we caught them up, found a cache…until we came to a barley field. We walked behind from a distance but left the main path to undertake a rarity, an Earthcache. We gleaned information from another toposcope and then went searching for a rock outcrop which we had to photograph. A short diversion which told us much about the underlying limestone of the region.

Toposcope Number 2

We dropped down to a picnic area and located a standard cache, and again passed on a multi which pushed us back on the path we had just walked.

Broadway Tower

And then our final ascent of the day. Far gentler than the earlier ascent, we walked up a grassy slope to Broadway Tower. From the Tower 13 counties are supposedly visible, slightly more from the top of the 65ft tower. We hadn’t booked tickets to go up the Tower, and the queue was quite long, so we set about calculating the co-ordinates for yet another multi. And yet again the final was in the wrong direction for us. All these calculations and not a cache found!

The descent went by a Deer Park but the narrow footpath wasn’t the best for ‘deer watching’ and ‘social distancing’. Leaving the Tower we were going downhill for the last time, to the town/village of Broadway.

Its a long way down!

As we descended the sky became blacker and blacker. This gave us an excuse to omit a couple of standard caches which were 400 yards away from our route down.

Broadway

Gentle rain was falling as we arrived in the pretty town/village of Broadway. Broadway hosts a plethora of Church Micros and we collected two on the short walk back to our car. Two straightforward finds hidden in street furniture.

We drove back to Chipping Campden and as we did so the skies brightened slightly so we explored the town before returning to Bourton-on-the-Water. We walked along the main high street reaching the official start (or end) of the Cotswold Way at the Market Hall. This was near our last find of the day in/under/near a water trough!

Market Hall, Chipping Campden

So a busy day,fraught at the beginning, and several fruitless multis. We did find 10 caches, most of which are shown below :

July 31 : Trackable : Hoolegans Navi-Gator

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Hoolegans Navi-Gator

It’s a while since we found a trackable – we stopped caching during lockdown – but we came across one while sweating our way along the MacMillan Way on the hottest day of the year.
It’s Hoolegans Navi-Gator, an alligator attached to a model of ET’s head (hmm, an unusual pairing). But this pair have been around since August 2012 and are going strong, having travelled just under 24,000 miles in that time. Having said that, the trackable has undertaken a very few, very long journeys, and a myriad of short ones in between.

It started in California in August 2012, then went to Canada – the Yukon, then Alberta – in spring 2013. Then it went off to England, and has stayed there ever since, with one exception. It has been repeatedly to London, Oxford (it must have visited every cache in Oxford!), Eastern England, and South West England. There was a patch between February 2015 and August 2017 where not a single log was recorded; perhaps it was in some cacher’s rucksack, just waiting …

But what of that one exception – the trackable made a very short trip to Rio de Janeiro in November 2018, when the person holding it was doing two week’s field work in Brazil, and found time to do just one earthcache. What a long way there and back for one cache! Then it was back to England, and the time in between has been occupied with more visits to Oxford, London, and South West England. There was one brief foray to the Chilterns to take in England’s oldest cache, ‘View from Coombe Hill’, which we remember finding on our very first day’s caching in September 2012, and which we simply didn’t realise to be special.

And finally – it went off to South West England again, for us to find it in the Cotswolds on the last day of July 2020. We’ll carry it around with us for a bit, as it hasn’t seen very much of Southern England yet, then we’ll release it on its travels. It’s mission is to ‘Crawl from cache to cache, in constant search of a swamp’ and we’ll try to find something appropriate!

July 31 : Chedworth – a village, a villa, a railway and a bat

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

We were off for a long weekend’s walking and caching (hooray, at last!), staying in the Cotswolds. Near the end of our journey, we stopped for a short walk and a little bit of caching. But scorchio! It was already 30C as the geocar was parked in the (free, National Trust) car park in the woods close to Chedworth Roman Villa.

We planned to follow the Monarch’s Way over the hill to Chedworth village, just over a mile away (no caches until the outskirts of Chedworth) then return, over the hill again, along the Macmillan Way to the Roman Villa, following the Chedworth Wood Ramble (CWR) cache series. This had seemed like a wonderful idea when we planned the walk, but it was much cooler then…

Anyway, it was a pleasant, if hot, walk up through the woods, then over the hilltop to the outskirts of Chedworth. It was so very quiet, the birds were barely singing and there was not an animal to be heard.

Church view

We arrived at our first cache, ‘Church View’, which does indeed have a fine view of the church. As for the cache – we struggled to locate it and it took two goes from both of us before we finally laid our fingers on the cache container. It was hot and our brains were fried…

Moving on steeply downhill, we were on the village streets, and could see our next target, ‘Green’ (a grit bin), as we plodded along the blazing hot tarmac. A search again produced no cache, just an ‘out of place’ object and it was only a second look at that which told us it was the cache. All this while being watched by the postman and one of the residents – slightly embarrassing!

Chedworth church

… sundial on the side of the church

There was a nice shady patch of grass by the churchyard wall and we sat down to eat our picnic lunch and watch the world go by. We’d passed by this spot before in April 2018 when we were walking between Sandhurst, Gloucestershire, and Sandhurst, Berkshire https://sandhurstgeocachers.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/april-22-sandhurst-gloucs-to-sandhurst-colesbourne-to-foss-cross/ Reluctantly, we stepped back into the sunshine to start the walk back to the Roman Villa. It was not far to the edge of the village, and we were out in open fields with the hill stretching before us (sigh). Part way across the field was a cache, which managed to be part of two series at once, the CWR series we had been following, and also the Little Bridges Series https://littlebridgesseries.wordpress.com/about-series/ It looked like a bridge across grass, but maybe there is a stream in the winter? I searched for the cache, which was protected by some of the angriest and stingiest nettles in Gloucestershire, and emerged with it, tingling, cursing and grumbling. (And I pushed it back using a walking pole, one set of stings was plenty.)

Little Bridge

With me still tingling, we walked across the field, slope steepening as we went, till we reached a belt of trees. The slope steepened still further into steps, and we panted our way up to the top. And that was it, the climb was done, and we were on the top of the hill again. Another cache was there, and two more followed as we descended gently into the woods.

The path turned right and began to descend more steeply, this bit must be muddy in the winter. The embankment for the disused Midland and South Western Junction Railway loomed up ahead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chedworth_Halt_railway_station This area doesn’t seem the most obvious for building such a thing, it’s rather hilly. We found another cache, ‘Can you hear the ghost train?’, then dived into the cool tunnel under the old track. There were great acoustics in the tunnel – we tried train noises, howling wolf noises and a few owl hoots and all worked very well! (FYI we are both – supposedly – mature, sensible adults – but it had to be done!)

Chedworth Roman Villa

Emerging on the downhill side of the tunnel, we were immediately at Chedworth Roman Villa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chedworth_Roman_Villa Pre-booked tickets only, no cafe, and no ice-creams (oh, how we would have loved an ice-cream). Disappointed, we continued through the car park to find two National Trust people staring at something on the ground. It was a baby short-eared bat, about the size of a mouse, and it shouldn’t have been there, it should have been in the cooler bushes rather than being hot and confused in the sun. The NT people tried, futilely, to get the little bat to climb onto a stick, but it didn’t want to, and bit the stick (FYI, you can’t touch bats without a licence, they’re protected). So Mrs Hg137 exercised her bat herding skills and drove/shepherded the little bat into the hedge using a couple of large leaves and a bit of looming over it, but absolutely no touching. (Editor’s note: we’ve both held bats before during nature talks and they are NOT scary, they are warm and velvety and really rather nice.)

Short eared bat

There was a final cache to find, ‘Roman Villa’ (seemed appropriate) before returning to the geocar, which now said it was 34C, and went on our way to our weekend destination, Bourton on the Water.

Here are some of the caches we found:

November 3 : Sandhurst geocachers trail trackable

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Finally, the trail trackable comes home!

We dipped the trail trackable in our own cache, Berry Bank cache, as we left home, and the trackable came with us as we left Sandhurst (Berkshire) on a cold January day in 2017, and on past Guildford, through the Surrey Hills to Leith Hill tower.

Leith Hill Tower

Down into the Weald, we skirted Gatwick Airport and moved on to Ashdown Forest, home of Winnie the Pooh.

Bodiam Castle

Turning south near Tunbridge Wells, we paused to look at the Flying Scotsman as it steamed by, then carried on through the Sussex countryside as spring progressed, and crossed into Kent, just north of Bodiam Castle, to arrive at Sandhurst (Kent) in late May 2017.

Sandhurst, Kent

Sandhurst, Gloucestershire

Forward in time to early April 2018, and we were now on the soggy banks of the River Severn at Sandhurst (Gloucestershire). We made our way between Gloucester and Cheltenham, over the M5, then climbed up the scarp slope of the Cotswolds to arrive at Crickley Hill. Crossing the busy A419, we continued through the hills, passing through Chedworth, then down the Coln valley to Bibury.

Bibury

Crossing the River Thames near Lechlade, we continued into Oxfordshire, across the Vale of the White Horse, and up to and over the Ridgeway during the hottest part of a very warm summer. On the Berkshire side of the Ridgeway, the route carried on down the Lambourn valley as autumn approached, then crossed the Kennet and Avon canal and headed across country to the Roman city of Silchester. From there, the remainder of the route followed the River Blackwater back home to Sandhurst (Berkshire) in early November 2018.

Silchester Amphitheatre

To complete the route, we dipped the travel trackable at Berry bank cache again, and walked the last short distance to home. Job done!

Journey’s End

That’s 180 miles across almost the whole of southern England, a great variety of landscape, agriculture, people and wildlife, but just one large town, Newbury. It’s time for the trackable (and us!) to have a rest now!

June 8 : Sandhurst (Gloucs) to Sandhurst : Fairford to Lechlade

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

Fairford Church – St Mary’s

After a gap of four weeks, we returned to our epic walk from Sandhurst (Gloucestershire) home to Sandhurst (Berkshire). This section was quite a short one, between Fairford and Lechlade, mostly through the Cotswold Water Park.

Parking one geocar in a layby near Lechlade, we stopped just long enough to find a cache there, then drove to Fairford in the other geocar. There’s a superb free car park close to the church, so we parked there and started our journey by crossing the road to visit St Mary’s Church. It’s a big church, funded by the wool trade, with superb medieval stained glass windows, the only complete set in the country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairford_stained_glass Our plan was to collect information needed to solve the Church Micro cache associated with the church, have a quick look at the glass, find the cache, and be on our way. It didn’t quite work out like that …

Entering the church, a steward handed us an audio guide which detailed all sorts of things about the windows and the church. It would take well over an hour to see everything – there are 28 windows, and other things. But we needed to get on, and get walking. We compromised and looked at a few selected windows, found the information and left. (Editor’s note: we didn’t have time to do justice to this church interior but it is very well worth visiting and spending a while just looking at the windows; each one contains a wealth of detail and symbolism well covered in the audio guide.)

Leaving the church, we went to look for the cache, which was located very close to where the car was parked. Or should have been. Some nettle stings later, we abandoned our search, and finally set off. Oh dear, it was rather later in the day than we had intended. We walked through the town, skirted some building work, and set out along the track of an abandoned railway, now a path http://www.fairfordbranch.co.uk/Fairford.htm There’s a cache along here too, one from the ‘Sidetracked’ series. (Editor’s note: geocaches really do help with finding a route, we would have struggled to find this path without that location to guide us.)

After a bit, we reached the water park and followed a selection of paths leading round the lakes. Once again, it didn’t go to plan … the lakes are still being dug out, so the map doesn’t match what is on the ground … and we couldn’t find several of the caches we were looking for. They were part of a series planted by a local Scout troop to get their geocaching badge, but we suspect that the interest wanes a bit once the badge is achieved, and the caches aren’t maintained as well as they could have been.

Some day soon, this will be houses …

After some bumbling about we arrived at the edge of a housing development in progress, https://www.thelakesbyyoo.com There was a footpath somewhere, but we couldn’t spot it, and there were forbidding signs warning of dire consequences for any trangression. We approached a Gurkha security officer, asked the way, and were efficiently, promptly, and politely given a map (maybe we weren’t the first to ask). Emboldened, we set off, talked our way past some burly security guards, using the map as a talisman, clambered through a live building area, close to a digger, waving the map as a pass, and found our way onto a road leading through the already-built bit of the estate. There were some very large and very expensive houses here, but it didn’t do it for me: some of the lakes were a rather strange colour, and the buildings were a bit “Thames Valley Park” meets “Center Parcs”. I was glad when we emerged onto the Thames and Severn Way, leading us towards Lechlade.

Strange water colour?

Almost immediately we were finding caches from another series, the SSS / Seven Stile Stroll, which led us nicely into Lechlade, with only one failure among the five we attempted. Part way along the path we stopped for a welcome coffee break – we couldn’t stop in the building site/housing estate – and watched a small number of escaped sheep frolicking at the other side of the field. They spotted us, became embarrassed, and sheepishly slunk back to their field …

Lechlade

The path ended at the edge of Lechlade and we were soon in the town centre, it’s not a huge place. There are some quirky things to be seen – an all-year round Christmas shop, and a five foot high blue fibreglass hare being just two of them. A large blue hare? Why? Dunno. We went to the church, had a quick look inside – very pleasant, but not on the scale of Fairford – then worked out the answer for the Lechlade Church Micro which was, of course, a place that we had passed as we walked into the town. Then it was just a short walk along a tree-lined path out of town and we were back at the geocar; we’d been here before in March 2015 when we were walking the Thames Path.

It’s Christmas all year in Lechlade….

… and giant blue hares live in Lechalade too…

We drove back to Fairford to collect the other geocar. We were, once again, very close to the first cache of the day, which we didn’t find earlier. Once again, we braved the nettles. And this time we found a cache! (Editor’s note: when logging the cache, we found that it had been replaced, during the day, with the cache owner’s permission, so we hadn’t missed it on our first visit.)

And here, as ever, are some of the caches we found:

April 22 : Sandhurst (Gloucs) to Sandhurst : Colesbourne to Foss Cross

Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.

A night (staying nearby in Great Witcombe) had passed, and it was time for the fifth section of our epic walk from Sandhurst (Gloucestershire) home to Sandhurst (Berkshire). Starting at Colesbourne, where we finished the last walk, we were going up and across the hill tops to Chedworth, then finishing the walk where our route crossed the Fosse Way at Foss Cross (and yes, there is no consistency at all in those place names – almost everywhere else it’s ‘Fosse’ but not at ‘Foss’ Cross).

But first … a slight diversion on our way to Colesbourne. There is a puzzle cache based on the village called ‘When were these Coles Born?’ and we had solved the puzzle based on that neat turn of phrase, and stopped off to collect the cache on our way to the village. We planned to park one car at Colesbourne Church. Silly me – I had forgotten it was Sunday. No spaces at the church. We rethought, backtracked, and parked the car next to a wine wholesaler, having first checked it was closed on Sundays (unlike churches!) And off we went. The first cache on the walking route for the day was ‘Two Degrees West’, very close indeed to our starting point. The cache name made no sense till we inspected our GPS at the cache site – it was exactly 2 degrees west.

Colesbourne – 2 degrees west (exactly)

After a little bit of road walking, we headed onto tracks and into the countryside (and uphill). We found several caches as we climbed, all in good condition though some had not been found all winter. There was a bit of scrambling up banks, a bit of wildlife watching (a herd of about a dozen roe deer running across a field, and buzzards overhead), and a very, very pleasant walk through the Gloucestershire country while spring frothed and flowered around us. On the downside, Mr Hg137 snagged himself on barbed wire (the same piece, twice – he can be a slow learner!) and we both got stung by evil nettles, but that didn’t matter too much.

Spot the running deer!

Very pleasant woodland walk

There was about a mile of road walking approaching Chedworth where there were no caches, not one, so we sped up and hastened along. Coming to a road junction, we spotted a parked car. It was a Porsche. Next to it was … another Porsche, and another, five in all. Mr Hg137 couldn’t miss this chance and rushed over to the drivers to ask what they were doing. It turned out to be a photoshoot, which will be featured in 911 & Porsche World magazine in June 2018 http://www.911porscheworld.com At least that explained why all those cars were so incredibly clean!

Porsches everywhere!

There was a steep descent down from the hilltops into Chedworth, and its church, almost the first dwellings of any kind that we’d seen since the start of the day’s walk. Chedworth church has an easy-to-find church micro, but the inside of the church is also worth a visit, with lots of material detailing the exploits and awards of the bellringers, and information on Elizabeth of York, Henry VII’s queen, who visited Chedworth and is depicted on a ceiling boss in the church (an early form of photo, maybe?). Elizabeth appeared again for our last cache of the day, which was based on the village sign, which included pictures of all sorts of things related to the village – Roman mosaics … English queens …

Chedworth church

Chedworth village sign

The last leg was a cacheless walk over the flat top of the Cotswolds, passing a gymkhana, over fields, under a disused railway and out onto the busy Fosse Way by the Hare and Hounds pub at Foss Cross.

And here are some of the caches we found: