Royalty, jewels and the village hall mystery!

Back out on the hunt for the Geocaching jewel thieves, this week  I headed for Thornham Woods in Suffolk accompanied by my very own Watson...aka the other half. 

With just a handful of jewels still to find we set out on this great series. 

It was a lovely trail with many clever and inventive hides and the scenery was lovely from the lush damp woodland to the dry, yellow cornfield edged footpaths. 

The caches and hides ranged from a teeny nano on a footbridge; to a clever stick cache that blended in so well that I missed it...thank goodness for Watson’s eagle eyes...to a snake in long grass.

A tiny cache hanging by an invisible fishing wire between the boards of a wooden footbridge bridge, also alluded me, but after 15 minutes Watson spotted it. 

The box full of dozens of nano caches...only one of which contained the log...was another clever cache. 

Along the walk we came across some interesting wooden sculptures which added to the fun and the eco toilets were rather interesting as well! 

After locating the final missing jewels at Thornham, there was just one last task to solve the mystery and it meant finding over 30 caches before we could obtain the combination for the safe. 

In a bid to complete the challenge I decided an after work caching trip was in order and headed to Newton, Foxton and Thriplow. It was a enjoyable evening of caching and dashing and I successfully found a good mix of traditional, multi and mystery caches.

The most noteable were Newton War Memorial and village hall caches and four more in RYO62’s Congratulations mystery series.

The weekend arrived and I was keen to pick up some of the wealth of caches now in and around Haverhill. 

Over the past year or so I’ve seen a fair few green dots popping up all over the town, and today was the day to turn them yellow.

My first stop was at a rather old house, which was actually more historic than I first realised. It was the former home of Henry VIII’s 4th wife Anne of Cleves. A beautiful old Tudor building. The cache was actually hidden behind the information board. 

After a bit of bending I spotted something in a small hole just behind the board, and pulled out the tiny cache. But as I went to sign it I realised many of the signatures were from several years ago - 2015/16! Was this an old cache? 

I decided to sign the log anyway as I’d not spotted anything else resembling a cache, and set off for my next find.

The next sadly turned out to be a dnf, despite a lot of hunting, but the third was brilliant. Called ‘Postman’ it was a little red wooden post box attached to a tree. I had to fight off a few earwigs, who had made the box their home, in order to get to the log, but it was soon signed and a favourite point given.

More great creative custom caches followed as I headed out of the town towards Sturmer. The two child’s play caches were great, both toddler toys that had been painted black and the log book hidden within them somewhere. 

On one you had to open all the trap doors pushing buttons. As each door opened up popped a little plastic animal and the log was hidden in one of them. Loved this idea, being a big kid and so nice to see a great bit of up-cycling! 

Upon leaving Haverhill I was soon in Sturmer and finding caches on the ‘Sturmer Heritage Trail’ series. There were some tough hides and not all in friendly places. Many took quite some time to find and a few too many were hidden in prickly shrubbery or in that geocachers dreaded host...ivy! 

It was a very lovely walk especially the route back through the woodland, but I’m afraid I started to rapidly lose patience with trying to find some of them. 

Thorns, ivy, hints that didn’t always make sense and dense tree cover blocking the GPS signal, made it a much tougher series than it needed to be - not really my idea of fun! 

It was actually a much needed relief to find the sidetracked cache, which had spot on co-ordinates and was placed to be found...you’ve gotta love a GCZ Team cache!

Time had rapidly ticked away on the Sturmer trail to the extent that I didn’t have much time to grab many more caches once back in Haverhill.

To make the most of daylight I decided to walk back towards the car going via a woodland walk off Coupals Road. There were four caches along the route and all were found with no problems. 

I particularly liked ‘Need for Speed’, the name of which only became clear upon arriving at GZ to find the cache attached to an old rusty motorbike. It did make me laugh.

As I emerged from the neighbouring housing estate I had time to grab a rather high one near a subway - thank goodness for extendable grabber tools - and the Stumped cache at the cricket club. 

Although a slightly frustrating day at times with a few too many DNFs, I managed to pick up 21 caches and those set by the Bankiers in Haverhill, were particularly well thought out, and fun to find. 

The real excitement though was that the day’s haul of caches meant I’d cracked the ‘Mystery at the Museum’ and officially closed the case! 

Hanging up my beige mac and green rain hat for the last time, I got out my typewriter and began writing  my own mystery...the mystery of the Tuddenham Village Hall cache. 

Yes this week we also found time to set three new Village Hall caches. Two traditionals at Kennett and Herringswell and a mystery at Tuddenham. So far a few cachers have already visited to claim the FTFs and smilies. 

There’s one more in the pipeline, but more on that soon. 

The end.