Caching in Suffolk and Northamptonshire

Suffolk

On July 28th we stayed close to home, but decided to travel from Essex to Suffolk. We were tempted by a series around Belchamp Water, Belchamp Water Circular.

We were pleasantly surprised by the series as the paths were brilliant, unlike some of the overgrown areas that we usually experience on summer caching trips. I’d even go as far to say that we could have walked the series wearing shorts! The paths were well marked and well cut, and an absolute pleasure to use.

Through the fields

The series passed near the grand Belchamp hall, which I went to take a look at. There was the sound of peacocks coming from the gardens as we hunted for a nearby cache.

Belchamp Hall

Piratemania V – The Essex Invasion!

At last it was time for the Geocaching event that we’d been looking for for months: Piratemania V, a MEGA in the UK. Piratemania is an event in its 5th year which unexpectedly went MEGA last year. As you might gather from the title it’s a pirate-themed event. The actual MEGA was on Saturday 21st July, however we headed to Ashbourne, Derbyshire for fun and frolics camping from Friday to Sunday.

Docking the ship

We pitched our tent up at the campsite late on Friday morning next to fellow Essex cachers mel-ray and happycabbage who had arrived at about the same time as us and soon cracked on with the piratey tent decorations!

The good ship Cassandy

It wasn’t long before we were joined by more of the Essex crew with Hollyncharlie, yorkie63, risktak4r, bigbadjohn1402, tazzy1234, unobtainium, and geotrowel turning up shortly afterwards with most of them pitching their tents along our row so we were all together. With many people arriving after work the camp site was soon packed and heaving with cachers, pirate flags, and some very uniquely decorated tents/motor homes!

Just a small sample of flags!

Bradwell-On-Sea – St. Peter’s Way

…And finally the sun came out! In May when we went to the Essex Camping Event there were more caches placed than we were able to handle and had many left after the weekend was over. I was waiting for that rare yellow thing to reappear in the sky after months of darkness and rain so that we could head back to the sea side and grab the rest of the caches. On Sunday 15th July the sun finally appeared!

We parked at the Bradwell-On-Sea marina on Sunday morning and headed off for a 11 mile walk to bag the 55 caches on the eastern loop of St. Peter’s Way.

The eastern loop. 55 caches over 11 miles.

UK Underground Geocaches bookmark list

Firstly apologies that my blog has been quiet for a few weeks. I’ve been working on a bit of a Geocaching project! I decided to try and compile a bookmark list of all of the UK’s underground caches. I severely underestimated the amount of time and effort that it’d take me to put it together, but finally it is done! It was one of those “I’ve started so I’ll finish” kinds of job which I didn’t want to abandon. It took days to find suitable caches with references to caves/mines/quarries/bunkers in the description, and then days to filter through them to find, for example, caves that were true caves and not little 1m by 1m holes in a rock! It then took days to update the information in the bookmark list so that details about the caches can be quickly obtained. All in all, it was about 3 weeks of work, on and off which ate a hole into my usual blogging time. I was overwhelmed by how many underground adventures there are lurking around our country!

UK Underground caches

The final product is called Going Underground and is available here. It is currently a list of 360 caches in the UK and Ireland that are either underground or near underground features. Some of the caches will require you to go into caves, tunnels, etc. to retrieve them, but some will just lead you to them ready for exploration. Some features will include miles of underground chambers, but others will just be small sea caves. There really is a mixture!

I’ve included a rating system in the bookmark list which is based on the following:
* – Mentions an underground feature, but not enough info to tell how good it is.
** – Mentions an underground feature, some information, but couldn’t be sure how good it was unless I visited.
*** – Mentions an underground feature, and it looks like a good place to visit.
**** – Mentions an underground feature, and it looks like great fun, will definitely try to visit one day.
***** – Mentions an underground feature, and the cache looks absolutely amazing. I MUST GO HERE WHEN I’M IN THE AREA OR MAKE A SPECIAL TRIP TO DO IT!

I’ve also added the 5 star and 4 star caches to separate shared bookmark lists so you can search through just the best (in my opinion) of underground caching.

An example of the entries on the list

It is of course, just a personal project because I wanted to find these caches. Some information may be inaccurate due to the shear number I had to process, and some caches may be missing. If you can think of any I’ve missed then please let me know and I’ll add them. For now, enjoy and I hope it comes in handy for other people too. I will attempt to update the list monthly/bi-monthly with recently published underground caches to help keep the list up to date as well!

A real underground adventure – The old Bath stone quarries

Our trip to Wiltshire was spurred by one particular cache series, BearClawz’s “Above Below“. We’re very fond of underground caches and this series was a step further than we’d been before with the other subterranean caches we’d attempted. The caches are hidden in old Bath stone quarries just to the East of Bath. We’ve visited a cache in a cave, in a quarry, and been in bunkers before, however these presented much more of a challenge because you have to travel a considerable distance underground to retrieve the caches. Much more of an adventure!

The quarries in the area were producing stone as far back as 1833. When exploring the quarries with modern day high-lumen torches and taking pictures with cameras with powerful flashes it’s easy to forget that the miners With just candle light or the light from home made oil burners to see whilst working down in the tunnels. The work was all manual with the blocks of stone being sawed by hand. Some quarries in the area were modernised with a rail system, however others used horse and cart to transport the cut stone up out of the quarries. More photos and information about the quarries can be found on Derek Hawkin’s website.

From Derek Hawkin’s site: http://www.choghole.co.uk/PHOTOGRAPHSOLD.htm

In order to work out the entrances for the quarries you first have to solve a puzzle. You also have to decipher some text to work out the route through the quarry as you obviously can’t use your GPSr down there. I’d solved 5 out of the 6 puzzles so we headed to Wiltshire to see what we could find!

Just for starters

In the series there is one cache that isn’t in a quarry… well, not anymore!: Above Below – The Steps With a lower d/t rating we decided to head there first to warm us up, so on a rainy Sunday we left the campsite and headed to GZ. It was a simple cache, however it was situated near a derelict site: Monkton Farleigh Ammunition Depot. This used to be Monkton Quarry, however it was converted into a sub-depot of the Central Ammunition Depot by the War Department in the build up to WW2. It was used up until the 1950′s. The ammunition dump took thousands of men 7 years to construct and it became Britain’s biggest ammunition store with the capacity to store over 12 million tons of ammo. It was constructed in a way so that it would not be obvious as an ammo depot to enemy reconnaissance. It is accessible from the transit shed where The Steps lead down underground with remains of the conveyor belts that transported ammunition either side of them. We only explored the entrance to the old store, but after seeing pictures online I wish we had ventured deeper in. It’s definitely a place I’d like to return to for a better look.

Looking down the steps

Jubilee caching in Wiltshire

After our underground adventure for our 10,000th cache at Schrödinger’s Ghostly Wormhole Paradox we decided it would be fun to have a few more underground adventures. I searched the caches in the UK to try an identify a “Must do” underground cache. Instead I found a cluster of 6 in Wiltshire, just on the outskirts of Bath. The long weekend we had ahead of us gave us the perfect excuse to get away and do them, so we booked a campsite for 5 days and headed to Wiltshire. I was absolutely bowled over with the quality of caches around the area. I’m not talking about nice big circuits and long walks (Although there are loads of them too!), but single caches full of favourite points! As I had knackered my foot last weekend, we decided to take it easy on the walking and just focus on single high quality caches. It would have been easy to spend our trip walking grabbing 70+ caches a day, however instead we found just over 70 in total including easily the best cache that we have ever found…

Woodhenge

Our trip down to Wiltshire started the way that we meant to continue with finding a few odd “Must do” caches. The first point of call was Woodhenge for a virtual cache of the same name. Woodhenge is a timber circle. It was discovered in 1925 after an aerial photograph was taken of the area. It’s thought to have been created around 2,000BC. There are 168 post holes around the henge with most of these once holding wooden posts and some possibly holding sarsen stones and a grave in the centre which was discovered to be that of a child. The original stones and logs are not at the site anymore, however concrete posts have been constructed in their original positions to show how the henge used to look.

Woodhenge

The Essex Camping Event

Essex has been buzzing with great Geocaching events this month! We had Essex Meet #15 by Unobtainium on Wednesday 16th May, Mr. Crow/Kitty!!’s Goldhanger Meet and Cache Trails on Saturday 19th May, McWomble’s Heading Down Under by Hollyncharlie on Wednesday 23rd May, and now Grimmerscotting’s Essex Camping Event on 25th May near Dengie on the Essex coast! Anyone would think we’d all be sick of the sight of each other by now!

We arrived at Waterside Holiday Park on the Friday night and managed to get our tent pitched up just before it got dark. Over 200 new caches had been released to keep us busy for the weekend so we headed off early on the Saturday morning to get cracking on the new St Peter’s Ring series. There were 77 caches in this loop, however it could be split apart into sub-loops. We decided not to try and conquer the entire series and picked a loop that started within walking distance from our tent (about 200ft!)

St Peter’s Way