The Sketch
A Friday evening stroll around Caldecotte Lake, one of Milton Keynes’ balancing lakes.
One activity you can do at Caldecotte is sailing, and to reflect that theme the first cache of the evening was This Sporting Life – Sailing (GC2EYAE). Strangely enough this is right next to the sailing/rowing pavilion on the south lake. It wasn’t hard to find, and the area was remarkably quiet – I was expecting it to be muggle central. Maybe the good citizens of Milton Keynes have got better things to do on a Friday night than walk around the lake. Shame for them. It was a lovely evening, with the sun setting down through a mainly clear sky.
Next up was Beyond the Hide (GC2GFT6), which is a bit further round the lake and a bit off-piste. It’s one of those where you have to simultaneously avoid getting your eye poked out by a tree and getting your shoes full of lake water. Always tricky. You can’t look both upwards and downwards at the same time. Well, I can’t, anyway.
Trolls of Caldecotte (GC2GFRN) is pretty much what you would expect from a cache with “Trolls” in the name. It involves a bridge. This was a nice little cache, to be honest. Well prepared and well placed.
It’s October, Where’s Your Torch?
So next up was Trainspotting (GC2GFR9). It was a bit of a hike here from the last cache and by now it was starting to get a bit dusky. Not dark, but definitely getting there. I was, however, committed to a certain course of action because at this point I had no torch and I was at the furthest possible point away from where I parked. No advantage in returning the way I came, so I might as well go hunting in the dark, without a torch. It proved to be remarkably easy to find, and it, too, was in pretty good condition.
So, I was now just a short hop from the pub, but there was still a faint glimmer of daylight, so I decided there was time for just one more, wafer-thin cache. OK, I wasn’t quite as far around the lake as shown in this photo, but it was about this stage of the evening and I hadn’t taken my own camera. Another excellent photo courtesy of the Parks Trust and Andrew Coupe.
Cunningly, Caldecotte Sluice (GC2EYAP) was an equally short walk away, just off to the right of the photo. This proved to be the hardest of the evening to find. It just was, OK. It’s a little tin hidden amongst a whole bunch of concealing vegetation.
And then it was proper dark, like. I had to follow the lights on the pub to get home at all. Note to self – get a torch, soon. Still, 5 caches in a little over an hour seemed good. All that was left was to scoot over the road bridge, down the slope, round the road and back to the cache-mobile, followed by a quick drive to Emerson for Singapore noodles and beer, then back home. A satisfying night all round.