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The Sketch
A nice day for a bit of a walk around the countryside at Adstock. It was my first day out caching since we returned from Catalonia at the end of August.
There were a few series of caches to the south and east of Buckingham that I liked the look of for an afternoon walk, so I headed off armed with the usual array of bits and bobs to make my way around the AAA series and the PAP series. There were a few others on the route too.
The walk around the AAA series was fairly straightforward and I managed to find pretty much everything. The PAP series proved more troublesome when I reached the middle of the big field where the photos were taken. The lay of the land looked very different to the map, and it was really difficult to tell where the footpaths actually went.
I asked a dogwalker, but she wasn’t able to help, and after a bit of mucking around and staring incorrectly at a couple of routes I got unreasonably accosted by a member of the agricultural community who was in no way willing to tell me where the actual footpaths went. She was only prepared to tell me all the places I wasn’t supposed to be going. I thought that was a bit harsh.
Anyway, I plodded around and generally back in the direction I’d come for a couple of minutes until she left again, and then I resumed my long-range scan of the horizon.
Revelation
Eventually I spotted what seemed to be a gap in the hedge several hundred metres away. There was a barely perceptible route directly across the big field. The field had been recently ploughed, so previous tramplings weren’t obvious. Having spotted the route, I took great pleasure in walking directly across that field. I was almost willing the farmer to come and challenge me about it, but she didn’t. So I figured she’d had enough of the “get orff moi laaaaand” for one day.
It was plain sailing after that, aside from not being able to find one of the caches.
On the way home I stopped in Whaddon to do a letterbox cache that had been winking at me for a few months, and that made a total of 44 finds for the afternoon.
The caches I found around Adstock and Padbury on the day were :