A virtual cache with two questions to be answered and two optional puzzles to entertain you.
You will need to visit The Great Tower, a bronze sculpture by the artist Alexander at the published co-ordinates. The sculpture cost £50,000 and was unveiled on the 9th of September 1980 and was at that time the largest single bronze-cast sculpture in the world and caused an uproar at the time with the unveiling being boycotted by the Empingham Parish Council. The location was chosen by the landscape artist who designed Rutland Water which was formed when the Gwash valley was flooded to form the reservoir which was completed in 1975.
The Great Tower can be reached from the Sykes Lane car park is nearby with facilities and the Funky Fox Cafe (in 2018 fees are £1.70 for an hour (cache should not take more than 1 hour), more for longer and £8.00 for a ticket allowing use of all of the Rutland Water car parks for a day). It would be possible to park in Empingham village and take the footpath which is part of the Rutland Round to reach the Sykes Lane site. There is a cycle track around Rutland Water which passes the sculpture.
There are numerous physical caches around the reservoir and in the nearby area.
Questions to answer
Question 1: The sculpture was created by Alexander and nearby there is a plaque on which the artist seeks to explain the work. But who actually cast the work? (The answer is not on the information board, you have to think of where it might be!)
Question 2: The information boards at each of the Rutland water car parks often include odd snippets of information. So how many years would it take to empty the reservoir by leaving a single tap running?
You need to send the answers to the two questions to the cache owner but having done so you may log your find.
Optional puzzles
The answer to Question 2 you found from the information board is in fact wrong! Additional kudos from working out by how many orders of magnitude? The necessary information is all available on Wikipedia, but you might want to measure the flow rate of your own tap for a more relevant answer. You will need to do some very simple maths.
When you are at the sculpture, if you look out to the south into the reservoir you, will see what is marked on the OS map as a Limnological Tower. Such structures are used to investigate the behaviour of water at different depths, a study now referred to as limnology. There is no mention of this at Rutland Water but if you consult an encyclopedia (or Google) you can discover who coined this term and in which rather larger body of water, their studies were carried out.
Virtual Reward - 2017/2018
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between August 24, 2017 and August 24, 2018. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards on the Geocaching Blog.