2024-08-17 55 -1

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Sat 17 Aug 2024 in Blyth:
55.5406249, -1.8599137
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On July 31, 2012, the swimmer Michael Phelps won his 18th and 19th Olympic medals at the XXXth Summer Olympiad in London to tie, and then break, Larisa Latynina's 48-year-old record.

Among the millions not watching on TV was the geohasher Jand, who was busy unlocking the Camborne graticule while on holiday in Cornwall. As of that date in 2012, three locked graticules remained in England:

The Scilly Isles (stop it), a tiny archipelago 2¾ hours from Penzance by ferry, where cars are exempt from MOTs because there's nothing to crash into.

Lizard (I'll turn this car round and there'll be no geohash for anyone), a peninsula so far off the beaten track that the Great Western Railway skipped the usual process of building the line, shutting it down and replacing it with a bus, and went straight to the bus.

And Blyth, population c.500,000, high ratio of sheepy fells to croppy fields, very well connected thanks to the A1 and East Coast Main Line, perfect geohash country in every way except for two-thirds of it having disappeared into the sea since Paleolithic times. Damn Paleolithics with their heavy industry and SUVs.

Then, nothing happened for 12 years.

Location

A patch of barren moorland upside a fell criss-crossed by footpaths, halfway between the Coldstream road and the A1, a couple miles out from Chillingham and its castle. Beautiful!

Participants

Bottomley Potts

Expedition

Chillingham Castle is notable as the most haunted castle in England, or if you don't believe in ghosts, as the joint-least haunted. Britain's Most Haunted has been there, and the local radio station used to offer prizes for spending the night. I left my wife and baby daughter there to soak up the ambiance. Are those gunshots I can hear in the distance? Ah, that's a complication I hadn't reckoned with: it's the first weekend day after the Twelfth of August. I have to try hard not to look like a red grouse today.

Cap start.jpg

So as not to keep you in suspense, I can reveal that the person in this photo is me. I don't support the Arizona Diamondbacks, but I found this cap in a cap shop and remembered that I'd been trying to collect sightings of all 30 MLB teams' caps and was only missing the D'backs and the Rays. I paid a local urchin sixpence to put it on his head and play a round of Hide 'n' Seek with me, and he was good enough to give me it back. The t-shirt is from Tenaya Lodge in Yosemite, and the back says I Survived Geocaching At Tenaya Lodge, which I did (what, you thought this beard belonged to someone who had never stood in a field and done the GPS Tracker Hokey-Cokey before?)

Starting from Chillingham Castle (lower left) meant following the red dots on this map. As you can see, there is more than one set of dots on this map, and if you suspect that this is foreshadowing some Mild Peril you would be correct.

Big Map.png

In the Chillingham estate is a wild cattle park with a full-time ranger and several full-time cattle. The ranger was delighted to have received a visitor, and was most understanding when I said I was from the internet, and told me I wasn't allowed on the red dots and would have to go all the way round via Chatton. Private road for forestry vehicles, innit.

And we don't trespass on private roads while geohashing, because that is wrong and against the rules, as per No trespassing consolation prize: "Trespassing beyond the posted sign invalidates the geohash itself and is against the spirit of the sport." And as per the Posted achievement: "If a geohashers chooses to enter private property despite the presence of fences or signs indicating that they are not welcome, that geohash does not count towards this achievement (or any others), as it is against one of the earliest rules of geohashing." So there you go.

New plan, follow the purple dots.

A cool lifehack I discovered while following the purple dots is that when you see a sign saying Public Footpath with a place name and a distance, it's a good idea to not follow that sign unless the place name is somewhere you want to go. "But it's pointing in the right direction" - nope, footpaths twist and turn like a twisty turny thing.

Having lost half an hour doing that, I'm now a little conscious of time. Next decision, keep to the B road (pink dots) or follow the Trout Fishery road (cyan dots)? I chose wrong again and stuck to the B road, because it looked like the other one merged with the private road that I'd been told not to walk on.

B roads are Boring roads, so here's where I left the B road to follow another alleged footpath for the last 1.2km.

I made my final bad decision when I chose the green dots rather than the white dots, in the hope of crossing the burn once rather than twice. Lifehack #2: The shades of green on OpenStreetMap apparently mean something, and the lighter ones are better.

Exactly at the hashpoint I found a white stone that didn't belong. Glacial erratic, or left there on purpose by a ninja geohasher? It didn't have any secret messages on it. I arranged some grass to say XKCD, except that I'd just gotten back from Cyprus in the week (bad for geohashing, too long and thin, most of them land in the water) and the curved C and D of XKCD are hard to make with grass, so instead it said ΞΚΧΔ - Xi Kappa Chi Delta.

Evidence

Since this was a graticule unlock and not everyone believes that I exist it was necessary to gather some extra evidence. Here's me, the ΞΚΧΔ sigil, the mysterious rock, the Chatton transmitter about a kilometer ESE of the hashpoint, and the Spon section of the Times from 17 August - you can tell I haven't manipulated the date because the headline is Manchester United's win over Fulham on the 16th. Also photos in all directions from the hashpoint - there isn't much in the way of landmarks but you can match them with the edges of some forests if you want.

Escape

So on the other side of the field there was a gate leading to a gravel track. Yeah, if I'd followed the cyan and white dots, I could have literally driven the car to the edge of the field where the hashpoint was. It turns out the private road has a break in it where it overlaps with the Trout Fishery road, which at some point seems to have been extended to the east (fresher whiter gravel) to access a 4G mast. Ah well.

Graticule unlocked.png
Bottomley Potts earned the Graticule Unlocked Achievement
by being the first to reach any hashpoint in the (55, -1) graticule, here, on 2024-08-17.
Me hashpoint.jpg

After unlocking the graticule I was able to prise it open. It contained a seated bronze statue of Harry Kane, every Top Of The Pops episode from the 1970s, a working Nokia 3310, George R R Martin's script for Season 8, Elon Musk's "Mars Colony 2025" blueprints, an unopened jar of optimism, and Katie Hopkins.