About the series:
There and Back Again - A Hobbit's Trail' is based on The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. He lived near here for a large part of his childhood, and apparently took inspiration from Moseley Bog and Joy's Wood for some of the places in his books. There are 7 caches in the series, including a bonus cache. They are the first geocaches I have ever placed, and I have received permission from the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust to place them. You don't have to do the series in the order they are numbered (this is just the order they happen in the book) though I would recommend doing number 3 before the bonus, as it is the only cache with information for it. It took me 1 hour and 20 minutes to place these caches and test the whereigos, so you should probably allow a bit more time than that for finding and logging the geocaches.
About the cache:
'William, Bert and Tom' are the names of the trolls that Bilbo Baggins encounters on his quest. They are important, because this is the first encounter that Bilbo has on his adventure. After fighting them, he found a hoard of treasure, which is what you are going to find now.
It is a small sized container (on the larger side of small) which is recycled. This is a letterbox hybrid geocache. This means you can stamp the stamp in your logbook using ink from felt pens, and stamp your stamp in the logbook provided. If you don't have your own stamp or logbook, then you can just sign the log like normal. Please note that the stamp and felt pens are NOT trade items. There are a few trade items in the cache (clearly labelled), please swap these for something of equal or greater value. The geocache is not at the posted coordinates...
Follow these instructions hand written by the trolls and translated by Gandalf to find the treasure hoard:
At the fire circle, sit on the concrete slab looking south towards a path.
Walk towards the path, continuing past the multi-trunked tree to your right.
Follow this path for 60m, or until you find an obvious crossroads.
Continue straight on past the thicker path on your left and the thinner one on your right.
Continue for another 60m, or until you find a notice board.
Take the path left through the field and into the forest.
Follow it for 130m, or until you get to a fork, where the path to the right would take you to the road.
Look at the forest in front of you, and you should see several tree stumps.
Look under a pile of stones to find the treasure.