2010-08-14 52 0
| Sat 14 Aug 2010 in 52,0: 52.1118306, 0.6247366 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox |
Contents
Location
Off a footpath through Easty Wood, near Cavendish, Suffolk.
Participants
Expedition
A bit of a spontaneous decision to go on this one. I got home from work at about noon and promptly fell asleep. At 3pm I woke up, had a snack and just about made it into town in time to run some errands that needed doing. After getting back I made some pasta for a quick dinner, loaded the requisite maps onto my netbook and set off at 6pm exactly.
I drove along the A14 dual carriageway from Cambridge to Newmarket, then headed south-east on minor roads. These were a lot more fun. I passed through some pretty villages, ending with Clare and Cavendish in Suffolk. In Cavendish I turned left at the George pub (Google street view has its uses!) and drove a few miles on a narrow but well-maintained single-track road. This led to the tiny hamlet of Wales End -- three houses and a farm -- where I parked the car about 200 metres from the hashpoint.
A public footpath led through a cornfield into Easty Wood (there's also a Northey Wood about a kilometre north of here!). I took it, and once in the woods, struck off through the trees to the hashpoint. There was barely any undergrowth at all, so this was not difficult. More difficult was finding the hashpoint, as the tree cover made GPS reception difficult and the exact point (according to my Garmin) jumped around by several metres at a time. I did zero in on the coordinates at least twice. More difficult still, though, was taking a picture of this. I usually use my fiancée's camera to take hashing photos with, but unfortunately that has gone on holiday with her this week, so I had to make do with the webcam on my netbook. It almost worked.
After 20 minutes of having fun taking photos and doing the GPS dance, I packed my things away and set off back to the car. Just as I got to the edge of the woods, I startled a group of deer who had moved near the path. There were seven of them, I think, and they were pretty large and the males had big antlers -- on looking them up when I got home, I see they were probably red deer, which are Britain's largest land animals. They moved away from me, but not too far, so I was able to look at them through the trees for a while before they decided to leave altogether.
Going home, I enjoyed a beautiful orange-pink sunset all the way. I really enjoyed this trip.
Photos
The path goes into the woods through a tiny gap in the trees
Here it is!
More-or-less proof of hash
Looking out of the woods from the hashpoint
Good job the hash wasn't a bit to the east
