West Horsley Place Traditional Geocache
-
Difficulty:
-
-
Terrain:
-
Size: 
(regular)
Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions
in our disclaimer.
Welcome to West Horsley Place - perhaps better known as Button House (BBC Ghosts) or as Enola Holmes’ family home (Netflix). Having probably parked at St Mary's Church, you're looking for a decent sized container in plain view full of kids stuff. Please stick to the marked public footpaths (and new permissive rights of way) and keep dogs under control around livestock. If it's late enough, stay around and try one of the night caches here - they're a lot of fun!
Until her death in 2014, West Horsley Place was the summer residence of the Duchess of Roxburgh, and stood empty for most of the year. She left it to her great nephew Bamber Gascoigne, and many had expected him to sell it given it's state of disrepair, but Bamber had other plans. He gifted it to the purposely formed Mary Roxburghe Trust with the aim of using the estate for education and the arts. There is a 600 seat opera house being built at the rear of the property (see Phantom Opera), and the house is currently used several times a month as a location for advertising, television and film shoots. Carew Raleigh, son of Sir Walter Raleigh, once owned this property and although it is unlikely Sir Walter ever visited here in life, after his execution his head was preserved and kept in a red leather bag by his wife. Upon her death it was passed on to their son who looked after it until he died in 1666. He and the head were first buried in his fathers grave - only to be exhumed 24 years later and moved to a vault under the South Chapel of St Mary's church. Henry the Eighth however, was a regular visitor, to the extent that a large upstairs room that was occasionally used to perform operas had a wall built to reduce it's size by a quarter - so he'd have an excuse to sit closer to the action without anyone suspecting his failing eyesight. An interesting feature of this property, but only visible from within the garden (or from above with Google Earth) is the Crinkle-Crankle wall - a South facing wavy brick wall that created the ideal conditions for fruit trees as it soaked up the sun's heat by day and radiated it back towards the trees at night Although elaborate sounding, Crinkle-Crankle walls were actually money savers:- A wavy wall one brick thick is as stable as a straight wall twice as thick - but with 30% less material, a significant statistic when the Brick Tax was introduced in 1784. Strangely, there's a concrete one at the corner of Heathrow Airport's South-West perimeter - but I don't think they're growing anything interesting there...
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Ernq gur ybtf.