Dragon Hunting in Tadmarton

Dragons Teeth Trail

5¾ mile circular walk

12 caches plus 1 extra

A day off work today so decided to head down to Tadmarton near Banbury. Parked up outside the village hall, had a quick coffee and cookie and off we went.  A bitterly cold wind,  some of the paths were quite muddy after all the recent rain as it wasn't cold enough to freeze the ground.

Main Road, Tadmarton

 

We'd read the previous logs on Dragons Teeth - Special Tree-t  and a few cachers had mentioned cows so we walked very cautiously across the field as we had our dogs with us, we didn't see any cows but a short time later we were in the next field and we looked back and we could see the cows that had been in the same field as us, they had just out of sight, over the hill so we hadn't noticed them Phew!!  We didn't see any other cows for the rest of the walk just friendly ponies.

Is this a dragon's footprint?

An enjoyable walk although there was a fair bit of road walking which was quite hard going with 2 large dogs.

Completed in 2½ hours.

Then on to the Sibford Trail a trail of 5 caches on1.8 mile circular walk around the villages of Sibford Gower and Sibford Ferris.  

Very cute Shetland Pony Between 1 & 2

A very pleasant walk around peaceful villages completed in 1 hour 5 mins.

Sibford Gower

COLD WAR CACHE

Into the bunker

We saw this cache when browsing through the 'photo of the month' photos on the Groundspeak Forum and decided it had to be worth a look.  Our teenagers were keen to come along too so we had to wait a while until a date that we could all make it and today was the day.

Entrance

The cache is placed in a Royal Observation Corp (ROC) underground observation post.  Over 1000 of these posts were built to enable the ROC to observe the effects of nuclear weapons being detonated over the country and to measure radioactivity in the event of air attacks in a future war.  Towards the end of the 1960s the bunkers were all decommissioned.  You can find details of other observation posts in your area here.

We parked down the road so as not to draw attention to our activities and then it was a short walk to the entrance of the bunker.  On arrival I took one look at the hatch and the ladder that disappeared down into the dark and I said 'no chance, I'll stay above ground and keep watch' .  The rest of the family were keen and soon disappeared down into the dark with their head torches.  They were very quick to shout up that it was fine and that I should join them.  I decided that this might be the only chance I get to see one of these places so not wanting to miss out on all the fun I was soon down the ladder and really glad that I did.  It was much smaller than I was expecting but really interesting.  Well worth a visit and like it says on the cache listing........... all you need is a torch and a sense of adventure!

Pegz & Mr D signing the log book