One of originally five caches placed on the main road approaches to the town, the idea being to take you around the outside of the town and end with a bonus in the middle. Due to increasing lack of fitness we have had to archive some of them All are on fairly busy roads so please take care especially with young cachers and think about where it is appropriate and safe to pull over the cachemobile.
All, except the bonus, are similar types, but not identical, and are hidden in a similar way, Each has a little bit of potted history of the town, and each has information to make up co-ordinates for the bonus. Because two are now archived, the information for the bonus cache which was in them is A = F = 2; H = 1; I = 2.
Northallerton, in later history remained a stopping place for stagecoach travellers who brought business to its inns, making them rather more welcome than the Duke of Cumberland, perhaps, as he marched north. In the following century Charles Dickens, who stayed at the Fleece Inn, is someone the town is proud of entertaining.
The town's first poorhouse was west of the High Street near where the livestock market now is. Erected in 1444, it was the home of the Quarter Sessions until 1730, then becoming the poorhouse. Workhouse inmates were occupied in spinning for the local linen industry and different classes of inmate were only segregated when it came to sleeping quarters.
Northallerton had plans for a new workhouse, but the existing one continued for the able-bodied, with one at nearby Brompton for children and the aged. Opinion against a new building was intensified by a depression in the linen industry. The workhouse by then could accommodate 42 inmates but was described as "one of the most wretched poorhouses in England" with classification and segregation of the inmates severely lacking. Conditions were very cramped with small badly drained yards and a stagnant stream close by.
Finally, it was agreed to build a new workhouse which was built in 1857-8 on a site where a medieval Carmelite Friary had stood. Provision for vagrants at the workhouse was very Spartan. No baths were provided, and "casuals" had to break a hundredweight (about 50 kg) of stone to earn breakfast of a pint and a half of porridge and 7oz. of bread. New vagrants' cells were built in 1929 the year before the end of the workhouse system. The Friarage Hospital now occupies the site
During the First World War, military personnel were billeted at the workhouse, and in the Second World War, the site became an Emergency Medical Scheme hospital then, in 1943, was taken over by the RAF. In 1948 it became the Friarage Hospital, now a fine modern general hospital
A feature of Northallerton today is its wide High Street, nearly half a mile long with a fine range of shops and a thriving Market on Wednesday and Saturday with a Farmers Market on the 4th Wednesday each month. Parking is plentiful at reasonable cost or free.
Using the information in each cache, the bonus can be found at N54° AB.CDE W001° FG.HIJ