2024-10-29 53 -1

Location

A heavily wooded area on the outskirts of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

Participants

Dustlined
Little Dustlined

Plans

Another week off work meant some theoretical attempts at some geohashes, with one major challenge: my 4-year-old son is on his school holidays, which meant finding a spot which was reachable by tiny legs (not too challenging, not too far from civilisation).

Given he's not old enough to "get" geohashing (though I'm sure I could say the same of many adults), the plan was to tell him I'd been told about a great location to find conkers, and then just try to style it out if we didn't find any.

Expedition

After rocking up at nearby Hinchliffe's Farm Shop ("Britain's oldest farm shop" - citation needed?) and grabbing a toffee apple as a suitable bribe for our forest adventure, we set off along the leafy forest paths.

The toffee apple was on the floor within a minute.

The terrain was a little challenging - there was a lot of leaf-fall, and a lot of mud underfoot on a relatively steep decline, as we descended towards the brook on the forest floor. As usual, the overhead shots from Google Maps showed little more than the forest canopy, so it wasn't clear how difficult the final approach would be; in the event, the main footpath passed about five metres from the location, and then there was just a final, careful scramble down a slope (avoiding a spattering of brambles) with a large, thick-trunked tree marking the final coordinates. (I'm not a tree person, but a quick Google for the leaf shape suggests sycamore, hence a distinct lack of conkers.)

My son didn't seem to be keen on the final scramble, so he agreed to wait on the path when I ventured down to the coordinates; but once he saw that I hadn't encountered much difficulty, I was able to guide him down to the finishing location to earn the drag-along badge. Maybe in about a decade, I'll explain to him what that actually means.

This also meant that I'd finally ticked off a geohash in my home graticule, allowing me to officially mark my progress towards the Minesweeper achievement!