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

Caching around Thetford Forest

On Saturday we thought we’d take a trip to Thetford forest, somewhere we’d never been before.

Lackford Lakes

We started off trying for some caches at the nature reserve, Lackford Lakes. There was a massive fishing lake in the middle and it looked very pretty with the sun shining on it. The first cache we grabbed was LQ: SUFFOLK. We had to dodge the nettles here as we were wearing shorts again. Teddy wasn’t too happy with having to jump over the fallen trees and nettles to get to it.

Come on Ted, you can make it!

Caching in Dunwich Forest

Dunwich Forest (Norfolk)

Firstly Happy Easter to anyone who is reading this when this is published. Not only have we been spoilt this year with time off work “for free”, but we’ve so far been spoilt with amazing weather that’s meant to last! I’d been looking forward to my time off so much that I’d already planned a few caching trips very early and was really looking forward to exploring a few new areas.

On the Anglia News about a month ago they had a feature on “Dunwich Heath” and said that it was one of the top 10 picnic spots in the country. The videos they included looked pretty nice, so I made it my mission to find an excuse to cache in the area and visit the Heath for a picnic. Good Friday looked to be a stunning day, so we thought we’d go for it. There aren’t (yet!?) any caches around Dunwich Heath, however Dunwich forest was just a couple of miles down the road and had a series of 10 caches in it.

We started perhaps a bit late at 10:30am. It was quite a long drive from home though. The sun was beating through and the pine trees of the forest stood tall in their neat lines like big bright soldiers. The light at the end of each row almost looked like an exit to another world. I’m guessing Narnia…

The light at the end of the tree tunnel!

A blustery weekend of caching!

An FTF to start the day

On Saturday we headed out near Hemel Hempstead to complete a few caching circuits. About 20 minutes into our drive there my iPhone buzzed and I noticed a new cache notification for Windy Hill. It turned out that the cache was actually not far from where we were going. As we rarely bother with FTF’s we thought we’d give this one a go to get our numbers up. We probably added about 10 minutes to our journey by going for it, but that wasn’t really too much. The description said that it was a cache and dash so we parked up at GZ, next to a huge pile of dumped tyres (!) and I ran to find the cache. The coordinates were spot on, and the hint was good, however the cache was of very poor quality! It was just a tupperware box resting against a tree with zero camo and as I approached to find it I noticed a big, fluffy, dead fox rotting at less than a meter from the cache!!! The fox looked like he had been there for a few days though so must have been there when the cache was placed. Inside there was no swag either, just pen and logbook. Definitely one of the worst caches we’ve found as no effort had gone into it at all.

Nice to get an unexpected FTF however. We headed onto the series that we’d planned for the day, but first stopped off to get a cache with a difficulty/terrain rating that we needed, it was Bedmond Rat Run 2. It was rated difficulty 1.5 and terrain 4.5. It was a bit cheeky going for this one as from reading previous logs I knew the terrain was over rated. It was up a very steep bank, but probably no more than a 3 difficulty. It took a bit of hunting, but was soon in hand. The terrain/difficulty matrix is coming on quite well now as we picked up two we needed this week after I’d solved a 5d/1t puzzle in Cambridge.

58 out of the 81 combinations now filled

Caching near Ipswich and Epping Forest

Caching in Suffolk

On Saturday was the Ipswich meet, 2011 New Year Meet – The Barley Mow so we thought we’d do a bit of caching on the way to it as it was an area we hadn’t explored before.

We started off with a few church micros before we got onto the A14. These were Church Micro 1260 – Brinkley, Church Micro 1265 – Burrough Green, Church Micro 1261 – Dullingham, Church Micro 764 – Kentford, St. Mary The Virgin.

Church Micro 1260 - Brinkley

A great day caching in Suffolk

Today's destination

We’re running out of caches near home so today we drove just over 20 miles out Suffolk way. This was our first day of caching in Suffolk (And added another one to our “countys cached in” map taking us to 18 counties) and we had a great time. We found 36 in total, with 1 DNF and despite the rain coming in the early afternoon and lowering morale we still soldiered on and reached our 1600th milestone.

I’d produced the usual caching map of the area we were planning on visiting earlier in the week and hadn’t thought much of what caches we would aim to hit until this morning. We decided the first port of call would be Buenas Bures which we then realised was Andy_uk63′s. Excellent!