The Backstory
One foggy night in 1933 Percy Shaw was driving home from Bradford
to Boothtown along the road through Queensbury and Ambler Thorn. As
the road approaches Boothtown it skirts the hillside with a huge
drop on the right. The cobbled, unlit road was dangerous at the
best of times and that night it was made worse by fog but Percy was
used to finding his way by the light reflected on the
tramlines.
Except that on this night the tramlines had been taken up for
repair and the fog was dense. Only a fragile fence stood between
Percy and the drop.
Then, in the glow of the headlights, two points of light suddenly
appeared. A cat, sitting on the fence had possibly saved Percy from
a fatal crash and in that instant, so the story goes, Percy had a
vision of what were to be properly called roadstuds, strung out
along the road instead of tramlines.
Preperation
Before leaving home, ensure you are prepared. You should have:-
- A good quality torch, and possibly a spare backup just in case.
That old rubber torch at the back of the drawer probably won't be
up to the task. If you wouldn't trust the torch in an emergency,
don't use it!
- Batteries.
- More Batteries!
- Mobile Phone
- A Printout of this page.
- Suitable Footwear, preferably Wellington Boots, as some parts
of the walk are very boggy. The walk involves an elevation change
of around 90 meters.
- Tell someone where you are going, OK as a mystery cache I can't
tell you exactly where the cache is, but I can tell you that you
won't be treking more than a mile away from the above starting
point.
Part One
This is the easy part!
Find your way to the above coordintates; you will find yourself at
Reflective Roadstuds Limited, founded by Percy Shaw.
Shine a light at the front driveway and answer this.
When you've figured out which set of coordinates you should be
using get yourself to them!
You might even find yourself driving along the same road as Percy
Shaw, don't look down!
Part Two
The Main Challenge!
When you get to the coordinates you should find a small area to
park. There are some houses nearby, so keep the noise down!
Time to break out the torches! You should easily be able
to find a nearby stile, cross it and start to head downhill.
When you've just passed the first corner stop for a moment.
Think about the theme of the cache, and have a good look around.
You will have the most success finding what you should be looking
for if you hold your torch near your head.
When you are confident about what you should be looking for, duck
under the fallen tree and press on.
Take your time, if at any time you're not sure about the route
you should be taking, have one of you stay in one place, whilst the
other explores up ahead.
You should also take your time to make mental-references of
features you pass to help you retrace your steps.
There are a couple of places where the route forward isn't
obvious at first.
At one point you'll have just emerged from a "tunnel of trees" -
take the left fork.
At another point you will come to an open area with no obvious
route. You need to head towards the Holly Bushes directly under the
Emley Moor mast (bearing of 136 degrees). You will pick-up the path
again at these bushes.
Whilst following the trail, the cache location should become
obvious (you'll know when you see it). If in doubt decrypt the
hint. The cache is 0.3 miles (in a straight line) from the parking
location.
If you find yourself walking along a path with barbed wire either
side, you've gone too far!
There are Dry Stone Walls in the area; the cache is not near any of
these!
Part Three
Finding Your Way Back
After an exhaustive afternoon searching all possible routes in the
area I came to the conclusion that the quickest and safest route
back to the parking spot is to simply to retrace your steps. Just
use the reference points you've passed, and if you need to,
occasionally turn around and shine a light to confirm you're still
on the right path.
Though of course you could just use your GPSr's trackback facility
(if it has one).
The Cache
The Cache is a regular sized lock-top box, stuffled full of
goodies, including emergency batteries. Please consider your fellow
cachers and don't take more batteries than you need to.
Teaming Up
It's occured to me that a lot of you might be interested in
attempting this cache, but you don't have anyone to do it
with.
If that is the case, just post a note below indicating your
interest (or contact someone who's already registered their
interest).
You never know, I might be persuded to come over and join
you!
This cache made it to #1 on the geocacheuk.com ratings on
October 31st 2006.
Thank you to everyone who's enjoyed this cache enough to give it
such a generous rating!
