Inzievar Woods 1 - Rhododendron Tunnel Traditional Cache
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Karen
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Inzievar Woods 1 - Rhododendron Tunnel
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This is part of a series of caches taking you round Inzievar Woods.
This cache is a micro, so will need your own pen/pencil.
Limited parking can be found at N56 04.716 W003 33.907
The History of Inzievar Woods in a Nut Shell
Inzievar and the Smith Sligo Family
Inzievar woods formed part of the policy estate of the Smith Sligo family who owned coal mines and the local iron works. Although the Smith Sligos were jsut one family they had a whole entourage of people to look after them and the estate.
To house them all they constructed
Inzievar House - for the Smith Sligo Family
Servants and Stable quarters
Gate house
East Lodge (gamekeeper)
Kennels
There were formal gardens, walled gardens and woodlands. The drive was lit with coal gas lamps. The house was designed by a famous architect, David Bryce, and even the walled gardens were desinged by the same landscape architect as the famous Kew gardens in London. Jules Vernes visited Inzievar House and writes about it in his book backward to Britain, he is also said to have based the inside of the Nautilus on the state rooms at Inzievar. Even now acedemics come and speak to the folk living at Inzievar, reasearching all the famous people that helped build, or visited, or lived at Inzievar.
But local people were not allowed to walk in the woodlands. Many an octegenarian will while away the time recounting stories of being chased from the estate by the gamekeeper, reprimanded for gathering conkers, because the conkers belonged to the estate, the estate belonged to teh wealthy. However the Smith Sligos did pay for Holy Name church to be built (with spectacular stained glass windows bythe famous Gabriel Loir from Chartres) and for a local school for the miners children.
More families move into Inzievar
In the 80's the estate was sold, the accomodation was divided up into private dwellings and there is now accomodation for 22 families in the estate.
Open Cast Mining
Also during the 80's some of the land was developed as an open cast mine, however this happened at the same time that the trade barriers to imorting coal were removed and it was cheaper to import coal than to pay the local coal tax and dig it up at Inzievar.
New Woodland
After the mining the land was rehabilitated, new trees were planted and a pond created. Nature took over and year on year the ground is improving. Orchids flourish in the disturbed ground, pioneer species take hold and improve the soil structure, plants like gorse "fix" their own nitrogen in the soil and help improve growing conditions for other plants. Scotland has lost more than 99% of its original forest cover - native forests which once covered 1.5 million hectares. At nearly 400 sites across Scotland, of which Inzievar Woods is one, the Millennium Forest for Scotland has helped to restored and regenerated these woodlands, encouraging and supporting practical work to extend the cover of native trees and to improve the stewardship of both native and other woods. It has also helped to re-establish social, cultural and economic links between communities and their local woodlands, promoting a commitment to the sustainable management of native woodlands in the long term.
GPS was a bit poor due to cover of the Rhododendrons
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Erfgvat ba uvtu fghzc haqre fbzr gjvtf, arkg gb cngu
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