Saturday evening and I hadn’t found a cache for a week – well there are hardly any to find locally and it had been too hot to venture far from the cool indoor shade !
So as it was a little cooler I decided to go caching… but still feeling bored of finding magnetic nanos stuck on the back of random signposts and fighting through nettles and brambles for a muddy film tub I wanted to do something more interesting, so I headed off to Bolton Abbey to do the Virtual Cache there

20th July 2013 – Quercus quad GC43G6E – cache #2706
First though while looking for somewhere to park (as the main car parks are shut at about 7.00pm) I got to this cache A quick drive by cache, base of tree, covered by a rock

20th July 2013 – Two Trees @ Bolton Abbey GCH5X5 – cache #2707
I’ve lived just a few miles down the road from Bolton Abbey all my life, and have visited loads of times… so many times in fact that I hadn’t bothered with this cache before event though I had visited all the others around and even chose the “Bridge Over The River Wharfe” cache just up past The Strid as my 1,000th cache.

As it was evening when I went all the car parks were closed, (and there was a ‘do’ on at the Devonshire Arms, their car park was packed) so I parked down by the ‘old’ A59 bridge, I remember back 20 and more years ago when this was the main road – the ‘new’ bridge being opened in 1994 and walked the mile or so up to the Stepping Stones, now although as I said I have been here lots of times the last time I can remember crossing the stepping stones was back in the early 1980’s… so I thought that as part of the challenge for this cache I would cross the river by the stones… obviously there was not as much water coming down the river as there is in some of the Gallery Pictures for this cache – indeed the river did not even start until I was several stones out from the bank.
I strode out onto the stones without any bother at all, one stone wobbled a bit and the gaps are a bit uneven so I had to go from long strides one foot per stone to shorter steps with both feet on each stone, but it wasn’t a problem – until that was I got to the middle, and deepest point of the river, where it was obvious from the fact that the next few stones were dripping in water that the person who had crossed before me had come a cropper there ! and the wet stones were a bit slippery so I had to slowly and carefully complete my crossing (it’s at times like that you suddenly become conscious of the fact that you are carrying a £300 smartphone, £150 camera and £450 GPS, the GPS should take a dunking but the camera and phone wouldn’t like it !)
So that was half of the cache challenge completed.

Next bit was to find two particular trees and note what made them peculiar. When I first read the top lines of the cache description, ‘find two trees, note their oddity’ I knew exactly what the oddity was going to be, because I knew two trees with that particular oddity in the Bolton Abbey area… and I was right, I’d got the oddity without visiting the place… but curiously although I knew two trees with this particular oddity they weren’t either of the two trees that this cache directs you to, but were two similar trees further up the river in the Strid Woods.

On the way back I went down to the river and had to walk through all the picnic litter left by the days visitors… some people just have no respect for their surroundings. This time I crossed the footbridge rather than risk the stepping stones again, and walked back down the fields to my car

I gave this cache a favourite point as it beats finding a film pot at the base of a fence post hands down.