PLEASE NOTE: THIS SERIES WILL BE ARCHIVED SATURDAY 5 JULY 2014
History:
Brize Norton is a small village in West Oxfordshire that has been ‘swallowed’ by what is now the largest RAF base in the country. The village itself has a population of around 1,000 with Cotswold stone houses near the Church and spread along Station Road that leads to Bampton. A further group of houses lie alongside Burford Road. The village dates from the Middle Ages and is mentioned in the Doomsday Book.
RAF Brize Norton is the largest Station in the Royal Air Force, employing some 3900 Service personnel and over 600 civilians. It is an extremely busy station and is constantly in the public eye, as the main airport used for deploying UK troops worldwide. Their mission is "To project Air Transport and Air-to-Air Refuelling and support deployed operations and exercises".
Series Info:
De Boyz and I love our military things – especially planes and there’s plenty here! There are seven caches in this series in total, six traditional caches located on our walk of just over 2.5 miles in total, each of which holds TWO parts of a puzzle which will help you locate the final mystery cache. Please LEAVE these parts in the caches so others can find them too! Thanks.
If you follow the caches, which are all based on types of aircraft, in order this will take you on a short circular walk from the suggested car park. You can then work out the location of the seventh which is a short drive (it is walkable but it is a busy road). It should take a couple of hours or so to complete.
The route takes you on public footpaths, down some tracks and into the village a bit by the road (please take care but it is safe) and across some fields that may contain livestock but they showed no interest in us. There are some good views of the RAF base to be had, we were fortunate enough to see the Red Arrows coming in to land as we set this sereis up.
We would suggest you may want to take the following: a pen or pencil, paper, GPS.
This Cache:
The Hawk – One of the RAF’s favourite small trainer aircraft and used by the Red Arrows.
From the suggested parking at Elderbank Hall walk into the main road and turn right, walk down a couple of turns and left into Chestnut Close. Carry on round but almost straight on you will see the kissing gate and footpath sign, take the one pointing straight on and cross the first field and into the next over the double sty.
This is the first of the series and is a small click lock container (can you get smaller!) with some camo tape on and contains just the log and the puzzle parts plus, initially, the Tairyoku Karate Geocoin as we all enjoy our Taekwon Do. Please copy the puzzle parts and then LEAVE the puzzle clues.
After this cache follow the path left and into the next field, go about 100 feet around the edge to the left and then follow the well marked trail across the crops at an angle of about 30 degrees right.