Cotswold olimpicks

Tuesday 18 June 2013

Another sunny evening so we decided to head off into the Cotswolds and to the beautiful National Trust site known as Dover's Hill just outside of Chipping Campden. We had visited here a number of times previously just to enjoy the views, but this was before my two knew anything about geocaching, and this evening our visit had a whole new angle to it.

The co-ordinates led us to the Dover's Hill carpark and from here we had to gather information in order to answer a series of questions that would give us a new set of co-ordinates where the cache was hidden.

Firstly, two dates were obtained from the information sign. My two then set off across the hill watched by a number of extremely noisy sheep and their (big) lambs, to the topograph, from which more numbers had to be noted. From there, the geocache description was to head east towards a trig point. Direct east took them along a footpath that crossed a field of crops and down to the road. This clearly wasn't right so retracing their steps they returned to the topograph and headed north east and it wasn't long before they reached the trig point, from which they took more numbers.

Unfortunately the pen ran out at this point (clearly it was the female of the party that had broken it but she disputes this) so they had to work out the co-ordinates in their heads, which shouldn't have been too difficult but they kept coming up with different numbers lol. And when they finally had the correct co-ords on their phones, the compasses on the phones pointed in totally opposite directions! However, once they began walking the compasses corrected themselves so my two concluded that the metal on top of the topograph that they were leaning on had affected them.

A short walk later, the location became obvious, although they did not see the cache straight away as it was very well hidden. The hint gave a good clue as to where exactly it was, and sure enough it was. My two signed the log and set off back to where I was parked to pick the next location.