We love Marl Lane it's our favourite place to wander when we're close to home. It stretches from Station Road in Fordingbridge to Rockbourne Road on the outskirts of Sandleheath. Along its route you can find all sorts of things such as an old WW2 bunker, an old raliway bridge, lots of lovely houses, a rather posh school, some beautiful woodland copses and loads and loads of lovely nature to wonder over. It's also an old lumpy and bumpy beast of a public bridleway it can be a dust bowl in summer and full of muddy puddles when it rains which makes it the perfect place for a geocaching stroll. Having said that the terrain isn't too bad, our little geocacher always enjoys the walk with us.
You can find plenty of parking options nearby at the Fordingbridge end be it a local street or the town centre car park (given as a waypoint) and there's a parking option at the Sandleheath end at Sandleheath Industrial Estate (also given as a waypoint).
This is a straight(ish) run of 8 geocaches from one end to the other, we've built in a a slight detour from Marl Lane to avoid a cache that's already in place but to ensure there are lot's to find on the walk. At the Rockbourne end you can take a short stroll into Sandleheath and find some more caches or do an about turn and head back the way you came.
Please NOTE sadly the Bonus cache has been archived so collecting numbers from relevant caches is no longer necessary
Don't forget to pick up the couple of caches that are not part of the series but are on the route.
If you choose the there and back approach it's a journey of just under 3 miles and should take around 1.5 hrs to complete, with little legs in tow.
Number One
Let's start at the scenic Marl Lane Trash Screen........We promise the views do get better. You're looking for a micro sized screw top container which contains only a log book so bring a pen. It might be tricky to extract the log from it's secondary container (we always recommend the slap wildly against your thigh approach).
PLEASE NOTE THERE IS NO NEED TO ENTER THE FENCED AREA PROTECTING YOU FROM THE TRASH SCREEN
CONGRATULATIONS TO BADCATS ON THE FTF