Bring the only cache in the area (!) and at a castle (who doesn’t love a castle?) we figured it’d be worth a go. By the time we’d found a bridge over the river and walked up the winding
road up the hill, we were ready for our lunch, so we explored the castle grounds while we ate our sandwiches. Now, re-energised, we were ready to find the cache!
We quickly found the tree from the description, but 5 to 10 minutes hunting didn’t reveal the cache’s hiding place. We checked the hint, but it didn’t help: none of the things around
here are what the hint describes, for a strict definition of the word! So we started checking the old logs. Somebody mentioned finding the cache around 7 metres from the coordinates,
and that was helpful: we followed the nearby wall about that distance and quickly spotted a solid hiding place. We had to clear a bit of leaf litter to get to the cache, but soon we had
it and were signing the logbook.
Thanks for bringing us to this excellent location. FP awarded. Greetings from Lancashire and Oxfordshire, UK!
Where, I wondered, could I find a cluster of mostly-land graticules (“square” degree of latitude and longitude) in which nobody had ever logged a successful expedition? I’ve been
geohashing for ten years now and I’ve never yet scored a “Graticule Unlocked” achievement for being the first to reach any hashpoint in a given graticule.
So this week, we’re holidaying on the West coast of Ireland, doing a variety of activities that take our fancy and, hopefully, finding a geohashpoint or two in previously-unexplored
graticules!
Looking at the nearby hashpoints, we decided that this was our best bet. An hour and a half’s drive from our accomodation to a village near the hashpoint and we might be able to make
the rest of the way on foot.
Expedition
Driving conditions were sometimes suboptimal, but okay.
My mother’s never been hashing before, but unlike most people I’ve told about the hobby she didn’t turn her nose up at the idea so she was happy to accompany me on this unusual
adventure.
We met a surprising number of dogs out, alone, “taking themselves for a walk’. Like this one.
Our rental car did a pretty good job.
We drove to Abbey, which turns out to be a delightful village, and parked outside the community centre (where my mother was able to use the bathroom).
Parking was plentiful in Abbey.
We still don’t know what makes this wall “lazy”.
Then we switched to foot, walking along the banks of the stream and following the road to the East, towards the field where we’d hoped to find the hashpoint.
We anticipated there being nowhere closer than Abbey to park and get to the hashpoint, so we spent most of our time on foot.
A quick survey around the outskirts of the area suggested that it was, indeed, in what had once been an active pasture but had been abandoned and disused for many years. The grass and
brambles grew high and were caked in snow, but we hopped the gate and pressed on for the final hundred metres.
Very close…!
We made the right choice: the hashpoint was just barely inside the disused old field, and we were able to get to it with only slightly wet feet and without disturbance (except for some
kind of nesting bird that was unhappy to see us, and some kind of medium-sized mammal – possibly a fox – that ran away as we approached).
View from the hashpoint.
We reached the hashpoint at 11:24.
Obligatory silly grins.
Flushed with success at this relatively easy victory, we continued our walk to a nearby dairy to see if they’d sell us some cheese (their farm shop was shut), and then crossed the river
and climbed the nearby hill to find the fantastic geocache at Pallas Castle.
The castle was a wonderful diversion on our way back.
Circling around from the hilltop to return to the car, we drove back home, completing our expedition (hashpoint, cache, and all) in a little under 7 hours.
