Fife Rocks! Series: Andesite Letterbox Hybrid
allieballie: No longer live nearby so can't maintain
Fife Rocks! Series: Andesite
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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This is the second cache in a letterbox series inspired by the Geological Wall at St Andrews.
The Geological Wall contains 22 rocks collected from all over Fife. A leaflet created by the St Andrews Geological Heritage Project gives details of each rock, along with Ordnance Survey grid references of their source localities. Hopefully this series will end up taking cachers to each of these localities. It is my intention to hide the caches as close as possible to the grid references given in the leaflet - this may mean that the caches are not necessarily going to be hidden in scenic, historical or interesting places! The information about the rock given below has been adapted from the Geological Wall leaflet.
Andesite is a hard, fine-grained rock which formed from lava when Scotland was volcanically active. The lava cooled quickly which meant that very small crystals were formed. This type of rock is rich in iron and magnesium. Crushed andesite is used for road building and railway ballast. Blocks of it have also been used in the past for building local houses and for paving stones in the streets of London.
Park at N56 20.861 W003 14.179 (to get there turn up Hill Road in the centre of Newburgh - this is the one marked by a “Parking” sign and also has a telephone box at the junction with the main road). This is a residential area but we parked alongside the wall of the house on the left. It may be possible to park a couple of hundred feet further up but is it really worth it to save such a short distance?!
Follow the road uphill - you will soon pass a track leading to the right and just after this the main path forks. Take the right hand fork (the one with the kissing gate visible at the end of it). Turn right after the gate and follow the path which almost immediately curves and leads uphill. As you walk up you will see a bench sitting at the top of the hill - make your way over to this to admire the fine views from here! Then head east to pick up the path which runs alongside the northern boundary of the quarry. This will lead you to another kissing gate (might be difficult to spot initially as the vegetation around it was quite high). From here it is a straightforward walk down to the cache and depending on the time of year you might spot lots of wild strawberries and lilac in bloom along this section. Also, depending on the season, please be careful when you are searching for the cache because when we hid it the location had large numbers of seven-spot ladybirds crawling over the stones as well as many ladybird pupae attached to the rocks.
Cache contains log book, wooden stamp and ink pad only (and something to write with of course!)
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Ybbx sbe gur ynetrfg fgbar fgvpxvat bhg bs gur yvggyr fybcr gura yvsg gur syng cvrpr bs ebpx ng vgf onfr
Treasures
You'll collect a digital Treasure from one of these collections when you find and log this geocache:
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