Part of the "Walking with Northwood" series.
As you may have figured, Northwood is lucky enough to live close to the Hamilton Gardens and walks through most days. This is an opportunity for others to take a short tour of a few highlights.
You will visit three spots - one of the 'original' gardens, and two fairly recent additions - before hunting the final. At each you will gather some numbers. Write these numbers down in the order you gather them. Assign each a letter of the alphabet as you collect them, you'll get from A through to M. Enjoy and explore the gardens as you go.
At the published coordinates, find a plaque. Get the five words of the name of the organisation that manufactured the item. Counting the number of letters in each word (ignore & and INC) gives you the first five numbers... A to E. The checksum of these number is 28.
Using these first five numbers work out S37° 48.(A-E)(B+2)(E-3)' E175° 18.(A-B)(C-1)(B-D+1)' and head there, it's not far. You're looking for the four digits of a year. And you'll be up to the letter I after you find them.
Your last stop before the final is S37° 48.(C-D)(A-H-I)I' E175° 18.HFH'. Or you could choose a detour to collect another nearby cache. Once at the coordinates, note the numerals off the information sign. The last number should get to you to M.
Now you can head to the final at S37° 48.(H+J+L)(M-K)(M-L)' E175° 18.LM(F+H)'. When you arrive, have a rest but not on that seat. While this can be a busy spot, it should be fairly easy to be discrete about making your find. The final is currently a black Eclipse tin (thank you Philip.Perry) due to muggling.
The three way points are within the enclosed gardens and not available 24 hours a day. The gates now open at 9am and close at 5pm (last entry 4:30pm).
There is no need at all to go off paths into gardens.
Logging Etiquette: Geocache hiders sometimes go through a great deal of planning to place their caches. As a result, they'd like to hear your feedback on whether you liked or disliked any aspect of the hide, or if you feel that some cache maintenance is required. Single word, acronym, or emoticon logs may be easier when you have a lot of caches to log, but it doesn't tell the hider or other finders anything about your adventure (or lack thereof) in finding the cache. Please keep this in mind when entering your log.