A Wet Walk in Northamptonshire

Upper Benefield Trigpoint

IzaakWilson Caches - Corby, Northamptonshire

After having a lovely week away in sunny Spain we decided to embrace the British weather and head over to the East Midlands to do a spot of caching, we've really enjoyed finding IzaakWilson caches recently, all good walks and caches easy to find with sensible hints.  The forecast wasn't good but we decided to go for it anyway. 

As we drove up the motorway it looked like the clouds might break up and the skies started to clear but as we got closer to Corby the heavens opened and it rained heavily.  Undeterred we decided to set off on our planned walk which was to start at #20 Benefield Gallivant with the intention of completing Benefield Gallivant, Deenethorpe and Back and Causin to the Wind all in one walk.  We'd already completed Brigstock and Back on a previous trip.  Well best laid plans etc .... it rained.....and rained.... and rained heavily all day and the paths started to turn into streams then the streams turned into rivers.  We decided it would be pretty foolish to continue the walk as we were concerned we may get cut off as the fields were flooding.  So we decided to cut the walk short after completing part of Benefield Gallivant and Deenethorpe and Back.  On our return leg to the car we approached the bridge at #5 Benefield to Deenethorpe Link and we were shocked to see that the bridge was nowhere to be seen but was now submerged under deep flood water!  So we had to trudge through the neighbouring field before jumping the ditch to get back on track.  After reaching Benefield Gallivant #13 we decided enough was enough and headed straight down the road and back to the car.

We arrived back at the car after walking 9 miles, thoroughly soaked through, our waterproofs no longer keeping out the rain - although have to say our feet were still nice and dry!!!  How on earth we managed that I'll never know but that was down to having good boots I suppose - mental note to reproof the coats!

I didn't take any photos all day as it was just too wet apart from one at the end where we bagged the trigpoint.  As it was I had to dry out my iPhone rather rapidly when we got back to the car.

But all in all we really enjoyed the walk, all easy to find caches with sensible hints - we'll return again soon to do loops we couldn't do.

Then on the way home I was checking my emails when I noticed some new caches had been published in Leamington Spa which was on our route home, so as we still needed our FTF for the month we decided to go and find them.   We weren't holding out much hope of being first as the caches had been published for over an hour and we know BigBatch is very quick off the mark in this area - we headed off to the closest two which were just a short walk along the canal and they had already been found by BigBatch so we decided to call it a day as we were freezing cold as we were still in our wet clothes - then I noticed another new cache published down a bridleway and we thought it would be tricky for BigBatch to be in two places at once so we decided to go for that one as well.  We set off down the bridleway and the area was quite flooded so I hopped across to where I thought the cache would be hidden and in the process managed to slip into the water and get my foot soaked!!!  Anyway the log book was blank!!! Just as I was about to replace it we heard a voice and it was ... yes you guessed it ... BigBatch!  So we walked back up the track towards the cars together and then went our separate ways.

.... and the end of another great caching day