Hello, Mrs Hg137 here.
Wokingham has many interesting old buildings dotted about the town centre. Many are marked by blue plaques, which have their very own Blue Plaque Trail. For the geocacher, the information on the plaques lends itself for setting multicaches and Adlab caches – those where numbers need to be found, or things are to be counted, to use to calculate coordinates.
On a bleak day in early January, we set off around Wokingham to find some of those caches. Our initial plan was to look for two multicaches plus an Adlab and its associated bonus (physical) cache, since all were based around similar locations and some of the same blue plaques. It didn’t go at all well; doing three caches at once, we got mixed up, then found one of the stages in one multicache had a problem: the clue item was damaged. In the end, we said – finish the ad lab and go home and get warm. And that’s what we did.
It all got easier once we were doing one thing, not three, and weren’t struggling to enter coordinates into the GPS with freezing fingers. (FYI: AdLab caches work from a mobile phone and rely on proximity to the clue locations.)
We started at the Tudor House, once a 16th century mansion; more recently, it was a doctor’s surgery: Mr Hg137 remembers it well from his days as a Wokingham resident. Walking along Broad Street, we stopped at Nationwide Building Society. This has a blue plaque, not for its current use, but for a previous incarnation as a cinema, the first in Wokingham.
A short way on is Wokingham Town Hall, a place where we’ve both attended special things: weddings, funeral wakes, Mayor Making ceremonies and much else. Today we weren’t going inside, just inspecting the blue plaque and the water trough nearby (it’s now a planter).
Leaving the Town Hall, we turned into Rose Street, wide and lined with historic buildings. Another blue plaque awaited us near the far end, on a (small) residential house; this used to be a school with 12 pupils and a live-in teacher – it must have been quite crowded!
Just around the corner was the last blue plaque on our trail, placed to show off The Overhangs, some of Wokingham’s oldest buildings, which really do overhang one of the main roads through the town centre. Once again, the location had memories for Mr Hg137, as he used to work there in the mid-1990s (he tells me it’s modernised inside, it’s just the façade that retains the Tudor layout).
We sheltered from the wind and worked out the coordinates of the bonus geocache. Our GPS gave us a direction to travel in, and we knew how far away it was in a straight line from us, but we didn’t know exactly where it was. So we followed a not-so-straight line along paths, probably not the quickest way, through car parks, and along roads, to arrive at … a place near where a postman had chained his trolley! Oops, we didn’t want to attract attention by rummaging there! But all was well: a glance behind a nearby object showed us the cache, tucked away out of direct sight. Time was pressing now, our parking time was running out, and it was a speedy walk back to the geocar, and home for a warming cup of tea.
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