Hunting around for new hobbies that might get us outdoors during lockdown, we decided to give geo-caching a go. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, it’s a kind of modern-day treasure hunt, where people try to track down hidden containers (often filled with tiny knick-knacks) based on grid references and hints.
There are thousands of these caches dotted around the countryside; some are relatively easy to find from the safety of a car park while others involve a hike. We tried our first last week on one of our walks around the backwaters of Windermere and failed miserably to find anything. But on Sunday we were ready to have another go.
We set off for Low Sizergh Barn, a well known farm/farm shop/tea room near Kendal, which also has a walking trail which is apparently dripping with geo-caches. Armed with map, grid references, and a few clues to the size of what to look for, we headed off into the great outdoors.
The trail must be lovely in decent weather, but we’ve had a lot of rain recently and the end result was mud. Lots of it, in fact. Thick, squelching, slippery black mud several inches deep on virtually the entire route. We oozed our way to a nice little pond fringed with doors for fairy folk, then slithered through fields on a ‘path’ (river?) with an electric fence on one side and a barbed-wire fence on the other, and not so much as a tussock of grass to keep our footing on. I ended up clinging to the barbed-wire at one point, and we couldn’t really see much of the scenery because we spent all our time watching our feet.
Needless to say we failed miserably again on the geo-caches, but we heard a buzzard, and at least we scouted out the terrain and will hope for a better result next time when we can actually stand up straight! In the meantime, here’s a couple of pictures of the pond, and a nice stream flowing through the woods.
FIONA GLASS 