Finding some of the Isle of Wight’s hidden geocache gems – Part One
It was finally time for our second holiday of the year and another chance to find some geocaches a bit further away from home.
Sadly, any thoughts of trips abroad this year are still off the cards for us as with work and family commitments it’s just not an option to find ourselves stranded in another country’s lockdown or having to isolate in hotels at either end, so we opted for another staycation.
Keen to go somewhere we hadn’t visited before and hopeful of finding at least some sunshine, we decided to head to the Isle of Wight in the south of England.
It proved to be a great choice. The island may be small, but it is steeped in so much history, having had some very famous royal residents in the past.
It also has some of the most stunning geological features; is known as the ‘dinosaur isle’ on account of the many dinosaur bones discovered upon it; and has lots of fun and interesting geocaches and walks. What more could you want?!
As usual, we made the obligatory stop at a motorway services, this time on the M27 just a few miles before the ferry terminal in Southampton. It gave me a chance to grab a motorway mayhem cache and in doing so, I not only clocked up my first smiley in the county of Hampshire, but also got to see a huge tunnel going right under the six lane motorway.
It was a very nicely hidden cache too…none of the usual fragrant smells of wee that can usually be found around the edges of motorway services.
I was also quite glad I’d had the chance to get out of the car and get a bit of exercise, as the ferry terminal was utter chaos! Due to some delay or other, we had to wait nearly two hours for our departure, but it was great fun once on board.
It really felt like we were travelling to somewhere much more exciting than just another English county. I can’t believe that we had never thought of holidaying, and geocaching, on the Isle of Wight before.
On first full day on the Isle of Wight, we set off for the absolute must see attraction, the stunning ‘Needles’.
Being a geographer, this was a particularly exciting moment for me. During my studies at school and beyond I’d seen countless photographs of the famous white chalk stacks in geography text books, and I had wanted to see them in real life for many years.
We parked up at the busy carpark in Alum Bay, near the start of the headland footpath. It proved to be rather pricey, but as we later found out on our return, it could have been free if we’d arrived later in the afternoon – a little tip for anyone wanting to geocache and not see all the other attractions and pay the all day parking fee.
Slightly disappointingly this beautiful naturally interesting landscape has become – like many others – rather overcommercialised. Shops, cafes, children’s play areas, rides, and even cable cars adorn the top of the famous multi coloured cliffs to the right of the headland.
We decided to swerve them and head straight to the coastal footpath, which heads out to the old fort on the headland and the Needles themselves.
It was a fairly easy going walk, and we picked up the ruba dub dub cache on the way, placed within one of the many cute garden ornaments adoring a residential front garden.
After a short walk we were entering the old fort at the tip of the headland and finally got our first proper glimpse of the Needles. Rising up from the surf, bright white, and several all in a neat row, it was fantastic to finally see them.
As the other half snapped some photos I began work on the Earthcache – so great to have one here. It wasn’t too hard to work out and after the obligatory selfie was snapped, we were off to try and locate the traditional cache, ‘The Lord Palmerstone’ – a rather old cache, placed in April 2003!
Rather inconveniently it was inside a building that was being repaired by the National Trust so we just couldn’t get wrong it, but we took a photo as near to GZ as we could get as proof of our visit, as other cachers had been logging it that way too. (The good news is, it is now accessible again…that’s how long it takes me to write these blogs!)
Leaving the old fort we headed to the newer fort up the hill and began to attempt the lab caches. However, it was yet another frustrating hour of wrangling with the Adventure Lab app due to a lack of phone signal.
I had 3G on and off, but the app just took forever to load the pages. Fortunately, this kind cacher had designed the series so it could be done in any order, so I skipped The Needles Old Battery, and headed for the Master Gunner’s House.
With a bit of back and forth up and down the hill, I managed to log it, and get onto the page for the Old Battery, a bit more back and forth and finally O2 gave me just enough signal to get the completed banner to appear! Phew!
It was then off to the newer fort to complete the other three and grab another nice traditional cache.
The fort itself was much larger, but perhaps slightly less interesting than the tiny brick buildings and ramparts we’d seen at the old fort. However, being higher up the headland it was easier to get a signal and we completed the final three labs in no time at all.
Back in Alum Bay we picked up the traditional near the Marconi Monument…there seem to be a few of these on the UK coast. It was well hidden underneath the viewing platform, but finally the other half declared he’s found it.
We spotted another nice Earthcache nearby, which required a beach level view of the stunning multi-layered and multi-coloured cliffs, but not fancying the steep walk down and up again, or the ropey looking cable car, we left that for another time.
As we weren’t too far from the large village/small town of Totland, and spotting an interesting geocache walk around another old fort there, we then headed North.
The series of 8 caches were all based on characters from Winnie the Pooh and it was an enjoyable walk through a small wood, around the base of the mound upon which the fort sat.
Sadly you can’t go into the fort, as it has been cleverly transformed into houses and flats, but it was nice to see that the parkland around it had been retained for public use and is widely accessible.
The caches in the series were really good fun. The first was a custom stick with log container inside and the next two were rocks, all blending in well to their surroundings.
There were also some nice sized Tupperware boxes, some of which contained TBs which we picked up to move on. There was also a cleverly hidden bison under a little footbridge, which I couldn’t see, but the other half put his hands on it pretty quickly.
On the way back to our holiday home we also made a little stop at Freshwater Bay to pick up two great Earthcaches.
As I’ve said many times before in my blogs, Earthcaches usually guarantee that you’ll find an interesting landform of some sort, that you wouldn’t otherwise of seen. These two were no exception. The Mermaid and Stag stacks were just fantastic, huge.
In order to get the required information, I needed to get a clearer view of the stacks around the headland, but the sea was coming in. Hence, I decided to use the seashore rocks as stepping stones and headed out across the shallow sea water, being careful not to fall in.
I managed to get far enough out and had a great view of both stacks. Info gathered, photo snapped and it was time to make my way back before the tide rose too high. I almost made it back with two dry feet but slipped on the very last rock and ended up with two soggy trainers! Doh! Oh well, I nearly made it…all good fun.
The following day, was less about caching and more about shopping and dinosaurs! It was rather wet and neither of us fancied spending the day as drowned rats, so we paid a visit to the fantastic dinosaur museum.
It was a really interesting place, lots of great displays and so many dinosaur bones, that had all been found on the island, which is apparently one of the best places in the UK for finding fossils from the Jurassic period.
We also popped up the coast to Ryde to do a little bit of gift shopping and to pick up a couple of caches including the ‘Alphabetical’ mystery cache.
I’d spent a bit of time before the holiday trying to solve some of the local puzzles and this was one of them. The final cache took us a moment or two to spot, but finally we had the sneaky little blighter in hand.
We also picked up the brilliant Brading House, which was cleverly hidden within the village welcome sign. The sign itself is in the shape of a house, and the geocache container hidden inside it’s wooden structure.
We’ll be sharing more of our Isle of Wight caching adventures next time, including a day trip to Portsmouth and seeing how Royalty live! Until then, happy caching.
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