Village Signs is a series of caches started by SmokeyPugs and based on the ornate signs depicting the villages which had them erected. The cache is is not at the Village Sign. The original incarnation of this cache kept being removed, so I have archived that and replaced it elsewhere with original VS number and a new GC number - so if you found the original you can come and find this one and log it again.
Lying at the centre of the ancient Whaddon Chase, a former royal hunting forest, Whaddon lies within Aylesbury Vale district of Buckinghamshire, adjoining the south west corner of Milton Keynes. The village name is Anglo Saxon in origin, and means 'hill where wheat is grown'. The village is referred to several times in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, generally in the form of Hwætædun. The village sign, designed by John Morris and depicting the origins of the village name, was erected in 2002 to mark the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.
Now, on to the cache - you need to visit the only (as far as I know) blue plaque in the village, which commemorates a particularly fascinating aspect of the history of the village (WP1). On the plaque there are eleven lines of horizontal text (ignore the text round the outside), and you need to collect values for X and Y, where X is the distance in meters of the cache from the Village Sign, and Y is the bearing.
X =
3,4.6:11,4,1:7,2,1:6,1,8:2,2,7:5,4,2:8,2,3:2,2,1:10,4,4:3,3,2:9,3,3:7,1,8
Y =
8,4,4:10,2,1:8,3,1:9,4,4:5,1,2:4,2,4:2,3,2:10,1,4:5,2,5:1,1,3:11,2,2:9,5,4:4,3,1:10,1,11:9,1,6
Letterboxing started on Dartmoor in the middle of the 19th century, when in 1854 a Chagford guide called James Perrott set up the first letterbox at Cranmere Pool on North Dartmoor. The idea developed over the years, but the basic principle was the same: the letterboxers used instructions and directions, either printed in official guides or passed by word of mouth, to locate a waterproof container with an engraved wood or rubber stamp inside.
Being a letterbox hybrid, there is an inked stamp in the container - this is not a trade item, and should stay in the cache.
If anybody would like to expand the Village Sign Series, please do. I would ask that you request a number for your cache first at www.villagesignseries.co.uk so we can keep track of the Village Sign numbers and names to avoid duplication.