Snowshill Scramble

Snowshill Scramble

St Barnabas Church, Snowshill

Length of walk - 8.45 miles
Caches - A series of 24 caches + 3 extras

We'd initially planned to go to an event this morning but couldn't make the early 8.15am start so decided to make other plans and when we saw that the forecast was for sunshine today we thought we'd head out and do this new series instead.

Geocaching has brought us to Snowshill many times in the past 5 years, we love walking in the area, in fact caching in the Cotswolds is what got us hooked on caching and we've spent many a happy weekend finding Wrighty's caches, until we'd found all of his and then we had to go elsewhere for our caching trips so it was really great to be here again.

The best time of year to visit Snowshill is when the fields at Snowshill Lavender are in bloom, it really is a stunning sight and worth a visit.

Snow on the ground in the shade

Anyway about the walk ..........

We parked up next to the church in Snowshill at about 10:00 and off we went. The stretch uphill between #3 and #4 was quite slow going due to the mud, we think the path here is always muddy as we've walked along it in summer time and it's still been really muddy .  Between #6 and #9 you pass through some very pretty woodland, there was snow on the ground and it was very sheltered here and we could hear a noisy water pump clanking in the distance, the other logs mention it so it must be working all the time.  We spotted an information hut through the trees so we popped inside to have a look.

Information Hut

Griff Groff has gone to a lot of  time and effort to set this series up, all the caches were easy to find, the most difficult bit was having to wait for passing muggles, it would seem the sunny weather had brought everyone out and quite a bit of the series is along the Cotswold Way which is  a very popular walking route but it wasn't a problem as it gave us chance to stand and admire the stunning views.

Stanway House

We have been to Stanway and Stanton a number of times for caching trips and it was lovely to walk through the villages again and see the Cotswold stone buildings and well kept gardens. 

#12

 In Stanton we stopped off to do Stanton Calling no more, where the phone box has now been utilised as an information centre, an excellent idea!  On our travels we've seen this done a few times with one village making use of their phone box for book swapping!

Tourist Information

 It was a great opportunity for us to do Twill Surely Rain by Wrighty, this cache was published after we'd completed all of the others in the area back in 2008 so it had been stuck by itself for a long time, so we made the slight detour to find it today.  The funny thing is, just as we arrievd at GZ it clouded over and we both looked at each other and said 'Hmm Twill Surely Rain' .... but no luckily it didn't and the black clouds eventually disappeared.

Twill Surely Rain

A thoroughly enjoyable walk which we completed in 5 hours and 20 mins, this included stopping for a picnic in Stanway and making a half mile or so detour to bag a trigpoint to satisfy our other hobby of Trigpointing .   We didn't take Poppy and Whisper with us today as it would be a little far for them now but the walk is completely dog friendly as there were no stiles and no fields of cattle.