First thanks to Lancashire County Council for their support both to Open Access walking and caching. Secondly to tell Hillgorilla that this series is all his fault as its been laid in response to his complaints that there aren’t enough caches on top of Pendle.
I’ve put the terrain grade at 4 which may be a little on the hard side but you are going the steepest way up Pendle – and going up twice. It’ll certainly seem that hard if you’re daft enough to do it after rain. The distance is just short of 6 miles.
It would be handy to have Explorer Map OL21 (South Pennines) with you but details of how to get to each cache from the previous one is included in the description. Many of the huge paths you’ll be on aren’t shown on the map and I’ve commented appropriately on each.
The caches are all double boxed in an effort to keep out the damp – please replace carefully. As the inner box is usually a micro TWEEZERS may be handy. Please also keep logs to a SINGLE LINE to maximise the time before I have to replace them.
You can start from Barley Car Park but it is shorter to start from free roadside parking on Barley Lane (328 on map). I‘ve included as a Waypoint. Pendle is 557m high so you’ve two ascents of about 220m each to make.
It’s best to do the sequence in order. Two or three existing caches are passed if you haven’t already got them but any over 100m away probably involve too much ascent and then descent to be worth the diversion. As Itschoppers caches are on the Pendle Way I’ve used an alternative ascent route.
DOGS are allowed but must be kept on a lead.
So on to the first cache. From Barley Lane take the farm road to turn right for Pendle following everyone else. The easy, paved, path goes right but where it does you will see a shale landslip and from its right hand side you can see two lines going straight up. The right hand one is water erosion. The left hand is a public footpath and you want it! You have to scorn the steps which are merely a permissive path to the top (and a couple of other caches). The cache lies at 412m so, sorry, you’re not half way up yet!