Meet a 17th Century Highwaymen in our new adventure lab mystery

Move over Mildenhall Murder Mystery adventure lab, there’s a new set of mystery labs in town…well just up the road! 

Yes, this month we finally published ‘The Barrow Highwayman Mystery’, our second series of adventure labs. And just like our Mildenhall series, there’s a mystery solve!

It’s actually taken us a good 20 months to get around to developing the second series. So long in fact, that at one point we feared we might lose the adventure lab credit having held on to it for so long, especially when HQ started sending reminders about using it last year. But luckily, they let us keep it long enough to sit down and write another one.

 

Whilst laid up recently, recovering from an op, I sat googling a lot of crap on my phone…like you do…and by pure chance I came across a story about a Highwayman in Barrow in the 1700s. 

As I probed various sites for more details I found different versions of the story, but all seemed to have a few common traits – clues at the scene including a handkerchief and a missing horseshoe, and tithes (a type of tax) being stolen. It was such an interesting tale, we decided to loosely base the new series of labs upon it…but with a few rather more colourful fictional characters and details!

 

Similar to our first series of labs, we’re turning geocachers into detectives, but this time, instead of solving a murder mystery, cachers will be using their detective skills to find who the highwayman is! 

 

If you like TV detective programmes or Clued Upp games, you’ll really enjoy it. If you don’t…maybe give it a miss! Although, that said, the lab answers don’t require any detective skills or work, other than a short walk, so they are five quick geocache finds if you just want to grab them and not worry about reading every page and solving the mystery.

 

Set around the West Suffolk village of Barrow, ‘The Barrow Highwayman Mystery’ takes geocachers back to the 1700s to meet some colourful past residents. 

And there are some audio files, so you can actually hear from some of them and gain further clues. But do excuse the quality, it did take quite some time to persuade (and bribe) members of my family to read out the scripts! 

The mystery of the thieving highwayman unravels over 5 lab locations, which take geocachers to some of the village’s well-known landmarks, including the shop, chapel, pub and doctor’s surgery.

 

During the series, cachers will find out what the Highwayman has been up too from the local constable, meet potential suspects, find out about potential motives and collect a series of clues to help identify the culprit. 

 

By the last lab cache, armed with an array of info and clues, including dropped handkerchiefs, missing horsehoes and the front page of the daily newspaper, cachers should be able to work out who the Highwayman is and why they committed the crimes. They can then use the info to gain the coordinates for the bonus cache, by entering the required info into the checker on the bonus geocache page.

 

The mystery labs are linear, so do have to be done in sequential order – not everyone’s cup of tea I know, but it was the only way we could ensure the clues and story unfolded in the right order. 

However, we have made sure the locations are all pretty close together, which is why some of the other great historical landmarks in the village are not included e.g. the church and school, which are quite a bit further down the village. And you will find the order of the labs is straightforward i.e. you won’t be running back and forth to complete them.

 

We hope geocachers enjoy them as much as we did creating them. I know the Mildenhall series was like marmite - appreciated by some, disliked by others - so I suspect this will be the same. 😊

 

We’ve also set four new traditional & multi caches around Barrow for you to collect on your way round the village. They include a church micro, village sign, and war memorial caches. So, if you’re looking for 9 easy finds, on a less than half hour walk, Barrow is the place to be.

Quick Tip - Park at the shop and work out the War Memorial multi, before you start the labs on The Green, as you can collect that on route too.

 

Of course, there’s 10 finds to grab if you count the bonus too…but that might require a little more time and a short ride on a bike or in the car to collect it.

 

Right, I’m off to re-shoe the horse, clean my handkerchief and start dreaming up the next adventure lab mystery. But I’ll be back soon with news of our other geocaching adventures of late.