Walking a country mile or nine

Sunday 3 Oct

I arrived back in Oxford last night (Saturday), almost in the mood to start settling back into a routine of work and domesticity (note the word “almost”!). However, I still had the hire car for another day and so, after doing a load of clothes washing and drying this morning and finding that my local church must have been having meetings elsewhere (plus the internet had the wrong time as well)), I headed off into the countryside for the afternoon.

I felt like doing a bit of walking with scenery and caching, and so picked Bredon Hill, which is part of the Cotswolds. What I hadn’t appreciated was just how massive a hill it is. It’s like a big inverted bowl rising up from the plain, some 8-10km in diameter and just climbing steadily up with no foothills. It is covered in fields, and there are many paths or right-of-ways, which make it a good spot for a stroll. Of course, my failure to comprehend its magnitude meant that what I had thought might be a quick jaunt to the top for a couple of caches ended up being a 14.5km circuit that didn’t even get to the actual summit. Part of the problem was that my GPSr would tell me there was a cache 800m THAT way (pointing directly), which seemed short enough, but then (a) I needed to stay on the paths, so there were no shortcuts, and (b) having found the THAT way cache, there’d now be another cache “nearby” and so I’d want to go and do that as well. This all adds up.

There was a sundial on the side of a barn (and I now know why it was an hour out and why it was still light when I finished walking despite the fact that it was nearly 6:30: the UK is still on summer time, duh!), there were the ever-so-slightly different sheep, there were stonewall fences everywhere, I “put up” some grouse (I’ve read this phrase in books: I assume it means when you startle a grouse and it flies up vertically from its hiding place) and there were many other species of birds around too.

In short, it was bucolic rather than spectacular scenery, although the views out over the plains of Oxfordshire and Worcestershire were expansive. I ended up with 5 cache finds, 2 DNFs (there were electric fences in the way), 3 encounters with stinging nettles (they will insist on growing right next to where caches are hiding), and the old legs clocked up about 14-15km or 9 miles … or 3 leagues (which doesn’t sound very far at all!).

I’m a tad weary.