I have found listed a total of 62 Benchmarks within a 5km (3 mile) radius of home – I’ve decided that this is probably far enough to cover all that I can sensibly see from my window (In reality I can see further than this in certain directions – and nowhere near this far in others, so it’s a good compromise)
I know there are more benchmarks than this but this is the list to be starting off with.
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There are 61 other OS monuments listed on Explorer 297, most of these on the levelling line between Skipton and Wetherby which runs along the (old) main road through Pool, Otley, Ilkley and Addingham. Apart from a handful of bolts and the Wetherby Fundamental Bench Mark – which I have visited as it is a YOSM Cache location – all these are numbered Flush Brackets (FB). There are a lot missing, in the 45 years since the last surveyed levelling of the country was dons many buildings have been tarted up, extended or demolished and the flush brackets lost.  Continue reading →

There are 27 Trig points on Explorer 297 – well that is 27 trig point pillar locations – though 4 of them are destroyed – I guess for completeness I still have to go and visit the site where they used to be though.  Thyere are 4 or 5 of them that I have visited recently and have photographs of, so I won’t bother going to them. The most difficult one to get to is the furthest away – Simon’s Seat… this used to be a 12 mile hike that you did from School, though I never went… so I am quite looking forward to getting there eventually… maybe not a 12 mile hike though, if I come at it from the moor side rather than the river side it is shorter and flatter ! Continue reading →

Geocaching is great fun, and I enjoy going out and meeting other geocachers, but after 4.5 years to make caching trips worthwhile I have to drive a long way from home to start with, which is putting a dampener on my enjoyment. So I have been looking around at something else to do.
I tried Munzees but that was so terribly uninspiring due to it’s repetitive nature (walk to next lamp/sign post. scan sticker… repeat) that it wasn’t the right thing for me, even though there are a whole load of munzees local to me – well there are a whole load of lamp posts and sign posts !
So I wanted something interesting and something near home… the answer came easily. I was doing some research into the Trig Points on Geocache GC45CC – Ye Ole Survey Monuments and found that there were 6,800 pillars and a further 7,000 odd other survey points used for either triangulation or height leveling…. and then there are the  innumerable further survey ‘cut marks’ some of which are listed on various websites and many of which are not, only being listed on old maps.  Far too many points to visit and catalogue, so I have to narrow it down to my local area.. ,and thus Project 297 was born… I live in the middle (roughly) of OS Explorer Sheet 297 Lower Wharfedale & the Washburn Valley (the corners are 12.3, 10, 10.1 & 12.5 miles away from me, so nowhere is more than 20 mins drive from home.
There are  27 Trig Point Pillars on 297 – although some of them no longer exist… also there are about a further 60 Ordnance Survey primary / secondary bench marks, mainly flush brackets along the Skipton to Wetherby levelling line which runs through Ilkley and Otley – finally there are hundreds of cut marks, far too many to search for over the whole map area so I will concentrate on the ones in the area I can see from the windows of my house – all Otley and a bit more.

The plan is to walk and cycle locally to visit and record these survey locations, there is searching to do to find them, and research both on line and elsewhere to do to find the cut marks… might even have to buy an old map or two… beats spending a fiver on petrol to increase my cache numbers by a couple of magnetic micros stuck on sign posts.

My annual Autumn trip to Hunstanton in Norfolk (see 820, 1670, 2070 & 2,820 caches ago). On this trip I had planned a whole slew of caches for the way down, but then on 5th November the  Ye Ole Survey Monuments cache was moved to a location “sort of” in the general direction I was heading so I replanned the route to take a 25 mile (and apparently 55 minute) diversion to go and find it. Of course driving through Norfolk and Lincolnshire is always likely to take longer than you expect, the journey which should have taken an extra 55 minutes actually took an extra 2 hours excluding a further hour spent stopping at caches and rest stops… lorries tractors and caravans, the bane of rural drivers everywhere… and a tractor towing a caravan is your worst nightmare, fortunately the only one I saw of them was in the camp site car park
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Geocaching Rockets into Space (Again) – On 7th November Astronaut Rick Mastracchio took off from the launch pad in Khazakstan to go to the International Space Station. With him he took a Travel Bug (TB5JJN1) which he will be using as an educational tool to help teach students around the world about geography and provide other educational lessons.
This isn’t the first TB to go into space, back in the early days of caching the first ‘space tourist’ Richard Garriott, (who made his millions designing video games) also known as Lord British in the geocaching world took a TB into space and left it on the ISS. Continue reading →