Sunday morning, bright and early after my work's Christmas do the evening before, Patrick picked me up and we went down to Beeley Wood to do a clean up. Beeley Wood is located between Hillsborough and Oughtibridge and was the location of a very badly maintained series that I originally completed in June.
I say 'completed' but I mean 'tried to complete' and I alluded to this rather subtly in my very first blog as I was still sore about the neglect afforded to this series.
Before I rant I will first say that several of the caches (the 5th, 6th and 7th in particular) had several comments by finders about how inaccurate the coordinates were - sometimes as far off as 50-60 feet. That's a major bugbear of mine and only serves to hurt a potentially lovely day's walk by slowing it down and 'spoiling the game'.
[wibbly wobbly lines as the present fades and we go into the past...]
The first two caches were on a road leading through an industrial estate and were nothing special but the third cache, called 'Beeley Wood - Dumpit Site' was hidden under a stone at the topside of a huge pile of trash which people had flytipped over the side of the lane into the woods over the years. I had found this on a hot summer's day (25th June) and after digging around trying to find this cache I then spent the rest of the day smelling and feeling as though I had slept in a wheelie bin. It was disgusting. Why on Earth anyone would hide a cache here simply beggars belief.
I found the next cache easily and then spend almost an hour, including being on the phone to someone who had already found it, before giving up on the 5th cache. (Terrible coords and eventually presumed muggled.)
The 6th was another easy find (albeit again with terrible coords) and then I had to do some calculating for the 7th as it was a mystery one and I was missing the number from cache 5. It was pretty obvious what the number was as it was a significant digit and anything else would have me a long distance away so off I set, in a bad mood, to attempt the last one.
Arriving roughly on location I could see two huge fallen trees which were part of the clue. I only spent 5 minutes looking before giving up; even though it was a red hot day they were laying in mud, I still stank of wheelie bins, the actual coords did not point to a fallen tree and basically I was fed up.
I walked back to the car and went off to do a lovely series a few miles away before going home. I reported the did-not-finds (DNFs) on the logs and added a polite-but-constructive comment about the dumpit site.
Over the next few months the number of DNFs on number 5 added up and also complaints about the location of number 4. Additionally DNFs also started accumulating for number 6 which I do recall was hidden quite blatently in a muggle-able spot right on the public footpath. Comments were also made about a trackable item which had been stuck in the final cache for over 6 months.
The cache owner (CO) ignored all maintenance requests and complaints until a reviewer stepped in during October saying something should be done. False promises were made, more complaints were made and then the reviewer finally placed the missing caches on 'disabled'. At this the CO closed down the entire series saying he'd left the area, and promised to pick up the caches as essentially they were now just litter, in November.
So the series disappeared and nothing more was heard. However I liked the area and I mentioned this to Patrick who had never done the series. My reasoning was that once you had passed the industrial estate, and all the fly-tipping, the woods themselves were a lovely walk and it was a shame there was no series there. So we hatched a plan; we'd go and check-out a circular walk and pick up the caches which we presumed the cache owner would actually have left there.
[wibbly wobbly effect and we're back to 15th December...]
So Sunday morning... we did a drive-by on the first three caches - yes they were still there despite the CO pretending to go and remove them, then parked up and set off into the woods.
What a difference 6 months make! (Obviously, but I thought the sentence had impact.) I'd been here in the height of summer and now it was the depths of winter; the ground was either hard ice or mud, and there were rotting leaves everywhere. The river was easily 18 inches higher than before and I was surprised to see that the weir was almost invisible - in fact if you did not know it was there you really wouldn't have known, the water flowing over it was so high it was almost level from the top side to the bottom side. Also riverside areas I had walked along looking for missing cache 5 were now several feet inside the river.
We struggled a little with number 5 as I'd forgotten where it was hidden and then went to number 7, the final.
Grr. We spent, and I kid you not, 70 minutes looking here. We unearthed every single tree that had fallen, or looked about to fall, within 150 feet. We might not be super-experts but we've got 18 months and 1500 finds experience between us and we tried and tried and tried to find this one. It was a beautifully cold day, we had a flask of hot tea, and we were in no rush. Plus we didn't want to be beaten. We looked online at the log and tried to work out who to ring and there was only one finder for whom we had a number and calls to him were going direct to his voicemail.
So like I say after 70 minutes we gave up and trudged back dejectedly. We'd just got to the car and Ron rang back giving us exact location of the cache. It was a tree I had definitely searched and Patrick had actually been to twice. We're pretty sure it has been muggled - but just to be sure we will go back and check again when we actually scope out the area for our new series. We didn't do it this weekend because there was too much mud and ice.
Overall we did 2.4 miles and Patrick got 4 finds (and 4 physical caches). None for me but I did get a nice clear head from the Sunday morning walk and hunt.
** Notice to cache owners - if you can't commit to maintainenance then don't place a series! **
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