Lady's Walk Letterbox Hybrid
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Difficulty:
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Size: 
(small)
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Fife cachers pre-pre-event meeting: “We need to set some caches close to the venue for the event”. Well this is my contribution!
Park on the roadside somewhere near N56 11.373 W003 08.975. This is the main road through Woodside. I sometimes drive down this road in the morning when going to work as it’s usually less jammed than the parallel dual carriageway. One day the traffic flow was a bit slow here too and it was just pure fluke that I happened to look over to the bus stop and my eye was caught by a lovely old signpost next to it saying “LADY’S WALK”. It looked to me like it was made of cast iron and was garlanded with a few flowers, but the bit that really intrigued me was the main decoration which was a silhouette of a lady in, to my eyes, a Victorian-type costume, along with a little dog. I had a quick glance behind it and saw that it looked like a walk through a narrow strip of woods, and then the traffic got going again so I had to move on.
Now you may (or indeed may not!) be wondering what an old signpost with a Victorian lady on it is doing in Glenrothes. After all - isn’t it a “New Town” - built in the mid-20th century? Well yes, it is - but…..Woodside was originally a hamlet that was here long before Glenrothes was even a twinkle in the planner’s eye, or even his parents, etc etc. When Glenrothes was being built it incorporated Woodside into it - hence the fact that you can see houses along here which are older than those you will find in much of the rest of Glenrothes.
My cousin was brought up in one of these houses just a few doors down from here so I asked her what she knew about this walk - why was it called “Lady’s walk”? Where did it go? What was it like? She had no idea of why it was so called but she said it was an “OK walk” and that the footpath went all the way to Coaltown of Balgonie to the east.
I tried to place the cache halfway so you can approach it either from the Glenrothes side or the Coaltown side. I haven’t been to the latter - perhaps there is another cast iron signpost there?!
In my imagination I visualise this walk in the 19th century, and a well-attired lady would take a constitutional here every afternoon with her little lapdog. Today, the walk on the Glenrothes side is sandwiched between the industrial estate to the south and the edge of a council estate on the other. It also needs a good CITO in parts. What would our genteel Victorian lady think of it now?
Perhaps I should have just stuck a nano on the signpost but I suspect there may be a few nanos in Glenrothes by the time the event caches are published so I have let you walk the Lady’s Walk!
Please note that this is a letterbox cache. The stamp and ink pad should remain in the cache at all times.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Haqre yrnirf ng gur onpx bs n qrrc tnc orgjrra gur ebbgf bs n gerr ng gur fvqr bs gur cngu
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