Finishing the Witton Weavers Way Series: the Turton Section
We only had the Turton Section (minus 1 cache we had already found on the section) to go to complete the Witton Weavers Way series of Letterboxes, so the choice of where to go caching this weekend was obvious.
We parked up not far from the flagship cache and got the bikes out for the northward section of the trail along the old tramline. The first cache of the day was a Dragon Quest one, which was on the way to the flagship cache. A nice easy one to get us started.
The flagship cache was another easy find, with some great views over the area, as befits a flagship cache. We then carried on along the trail, with a series of straightforward finds.
About half way along, we'd just started to look for another Dragon Quest cache when we spotted a lone figure coming down the hill towards us. It was Bob Adams, a cacher from Leeds. Great to meet you Bob!
After we'd found the cache, we carried on in opposite directions, but would meet up with Bob later on. The rest of the caches down to Old Man's Hill were easy enough and all had great views, which was a bonus. We particularly liked the aerial views of Belmont Reservoir and it's islands.
We then back-tracked to where we'd parked the Jeep, bumping into Bob again at the cache just before the Jeep. The next three caches were rumoured to be the trickiest of the Turton Section, so we went mob-handed with Bob to find them.
Charter's Moss was a very tricky find - it was in a really mossy, rooty area and unfortunately previous finders had made a right mess of the area, ripping up moss and throwing it all over the place. It's a real shame to see cachers do such damage to a lovely area.
We then went back to the Jeep for some soup and sandwiches, before setting off on the next section of the walk: up the hill to where the Trig cache was. The first cache on the hill, Snake's Nest, had had lots of DNF's but was a really easy find for us as Bob had already found it and kindly left his calling card to indicate where it was hidden. Nice one Bob :-).
As we climbed the hill, the views began to unfold, resulting in full 360 degree views from by the trigpoint at the top. We could see the whole of Manchester mapped out before our eyes and sat for a while pointing our interesting things on the horizon to each other.
We carried on down the other side of the hill, finding more caches as we went. After a good while, we arrived back at the Jeep. We'd chosen a circular route round the hill, taking in all the new caches and a couple of existing caches as well. The take-away menus as the themed Lizzardman Curry cache made our mouths water and made us look forward to the curry that was awaiting us at home even more.
A short drive up the A666 and we were at the start of the walk for the final 4 caches of the series. Up the hill we went and soon had all 4 bagged, along with yet another Dragon Quest cache.
Wow - that's the Witton Weavers Way series complete - 157 caches and something like 48+ miles of first class walking. Caching does not get any better than this. We've thoroughly enjoyed the series and would class it as some of the very best caching we've done.
On the way back down to Bolton and onwards to home, we stopped for 3 quick drive-by's as they were right on the route we were taking.
An excellent day out on a very tricky and challenging section of the Witton Weavers Way.
