We set out today to try and find five geocaches located fairly close to home in an area that we have only walked in once before. One of the footpaths into the woods at Great Covert starts off on the edge of the housing estate in Valley Park and we walked almost to North Baddesley in what can only be described as slightly challenging conditions! The first cache involved arranging 21 large pebbles into a set of co-ordinates - had we read the instructions properly in the first place we wouldn't have wasted so much time bumbling about with no idea what was going on but all became clear once we read what we were actually meant to be doing!!!!!
The footpath was muddy to say the very least and there were masses of fir tree branches everywhere, blown down by the recent high winds I suppose. At one point we chose to leave the main path which was more like some sort of muddy skating rink and go on an alternative route. This turned out to be a mistake as many people had obviously had the same idea and this path also turned into mud and slippiness with the added obstacles of fallen trees to throw into the mix. The amount of fallen trees in this wood was unbelievable, we thought it was bad at Longdown a few weeks ago but this was even worse. At one stage we lost the footpath altogether as trees were down all around us, such a shame to see. I tried to take photos of the devastation but they don't capture the scene very well at all, but here are a few.
Climbing in amongst the trees we saw two deer, fallow we think - t they didn't hang around for long once they saw us.
At this point we were looking for another geocache and the clue to help find it was - in the roots of a fallen tree, not a great deal of help!! By some miracle we did find an older fallen tree and luckily found the very small container hidden in amongst the roots. I stood at the cache site, looked round and counted 32 fallen trees, with many more hidden behind these.
Here, there was no other way than through, balance and skill required.
This is looking across the fields to St Johns Church in North Baddesley (on the right of the photo). There were a few lapwings flying around the field making quite a noise, I'm not sure if it was us that they had a problem with but they didn't seem overly happy.
Will these footpaths ever dry out? Just imagine the squelchy sound effects that go with the wellies and mud.
To sum up today's walk, we found 5 geocaches, slipped through lots of mud, climbed over, under and through umpteen trees and only walked just over three miles but it seemed a lot further as progress was slow!
No comments:
Post a Comment