Water Tower Down - 22nd July

Another early Saturday start and I'm heading towards the villages around Felsted. My first port of call is The A Fine Pair cache in the tiny village of North End. I've been here before to see the fine VR wall box and now it features in a cache so I get to look at it again. The cache was very difficult to find but I get there finally. It seems odd that there's a new log with only one signature on it and that was this morning! It's now 7 o'clock!

Up in Barnston, I tackle the easy multi to collect the VS and drive the short distance to Little Dunmow to quickly find the new VS trad here. I was expecting a short drive down into Felsted but due to a road closure, I had a long detour.

I was looking forward to having another look for the difficult trad at the Water Tower. The CO had visited it recently after a long string of DNFs, mine included, and said it was sitting there quite nicely. However their report gave me the idea that I had been looking in the wrong place. So adjusting my search area, I quickly found the very sneakily hidden cache. So glad to take this one down.👏 Staying in the village, I had a quickish find of the new VS once I'd found the sneaky host.

I drove north out of the village up to the site of the old railway line which now doubles as The Flitch Way. There are still quite a few caches placed along here but there was another old adversary that I wanted to nail. Saracen Horde #1 is placed near one of the old railway bridges, a fine example of Victorian brickwork. There has been a lot of cachers creep with this cache and the posted coords are next to useless. However a recent finder had posted up to date coords and armed with these, I had a quick find of another cache that has bugged me for a while.

It was time to head for home but checking possible routes, I note that one of the Felsted Hamlets series at Willow Green could be on the way. This series of trad caches form a journey around the hamlets around Felsted. It's a great series with a bonus cache derived from numbers in the trads. Unfortunately the CO doesn't seem active, the caches are mostly in a very poor condition and the logbooks are sodden so no bonus numbers.☹️ It's the type of series that deserves an interested CO. I tried to make contact with a view to adopt last year but no response, such a shame!

So seven caches, included two former DNFs, three more for the VS total and a few more post boxes surveyed on route. 😀

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