Thurcroft Colliery

The last week has been a quiet one Geocaching wise. We can handle the dark nights and we can handle the rain but when both are put together it starts to make us think why bother?

We didn't get out at all until Saturday afternoon where we had arranged to do a new series by n.e.a.r. over in Thurcroft with Patrick and Donna. This is reclamation ground on the site of the old colliery.

n.e.a.r. have excelled themselves with this 3 mile walk through nice open spaces and woodland and which includes 12 hides, many of which have had some good effort taken to disguise them. I was pleased with their efforts and grateful for their time.

Once back at the car we were all chatting and I realised that Hannah was very probably on 399 caches so with a nudge of an idea from Patrick we popped over to Dinnington, after saying our goodbyes, to pick up a standalone urban cache to round Hannah's day off on 400 finds. Following Patrick's description, as we didn't have this cache logged in our GPSr, we actually found it quite easily and it wasn't until later that night when logging the find online that we realised we must have found the old cache. It transpires that after several did-not-finds the cache owner had replaced it several tens of metres away with new coordinates. As Patrick had found it several months before he wasn't aware of this and had directed us to the old spot where, fortunately for us, the original container still existed despite the previous DNFs.

It's quite amusing, to me at least, to think of finding a cache several searchers had missed and that the cache owner had then looked for, abandoned and republished.

I just hope she let's us count it as a valid find!