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The Setup
All good things come to an end, unless they’re a Möbius strip (other non-orientable surfaces are available). You could walk around a Möbius strip for weeks and not realise. In fact, you could be at the same place but the other way up, without even noticing. None of that is true when you walk the MK Boundary Walk Magenta and Blue sections. Orientation there is difficult but not impossible. And you generally know which way up you are.
It was time for these two stretches of the MK Boundary Walk to be consigned to the great tupperware box in the sky. This, however, was no simple task. It’s a walk of about 15km one way to achieve that. As was the problem for most of the lives of the MK Boundary Walk series, it has to be a point-to-point walk. Parking spots up here are somewhat limited. You basically need two cars.
I’d been threatening to remove them since the summer. OK, I’d promised to do it at the end of the year, rather than threatened as such. Now was the time of the doing. The day of reckoning. A few of them had been reported missing anyway. I thought it would be interesting to see how they were getting on, having been out in the field for over three years.
The second car for today was provided by the good lady wife, so we started off by driving up to Warrington, where we abandoned my car in a lay-by for the day, and Kas then drove me all the way back to a random dropping off point on the road between Stoke Goldington and Salcey Forest. That was always the problem with the Magenta section. The start point has nowhere to park. At least at the end it was possible to park in Weston Underwood, but at the start there is an entrance to what apparently used to be a car park, but which always has the gates locked now. How anybody ever actually completed this section defeats me.
The Walking
Back at the plot, where people had reported them missing, I went to the site anyway, just in case. Some of them were subtle hides. So I found at least one of the ones that was supposed to be missing. I also found two boxes at one point, where someone had put a throwdown without checking first. And then I was unable to find a couple of them despite others having found them only days previously, apparently.
At the end of the day I had collected about 40 boxes, most of which were in perfectly good condition aside from needing a spruce-up in the camo ducktape department. It was quite quick walking too, given that it was January.
I still don’t like the walk through Killick Wood though. It gives me the creeps.
On the bright side, I got back to my car before it went dark (just). And my car was where I’d left it, which is always a bonus.
The caches I found and collected up from the Magenta and Blue sections are shown below.