A circular walk around the Clent Hills and then a few more caches near Bromsgrove

On Saturday we decided to have a return trip to the lovely Clent Hills to the South West of Birmingham.

A new series, themed on the old TV show, The Waltons, had come out on nearby Walton Hill (not quite Walton's Mountain, but it's a lovely location nonetheless) and the National Trust has put out a series of 5 caches on the Clent Hills too. It sounded like a lovely circular walk (and it was!).

We parked at the foot of Walton Hill and headed off on foot on what was looking to be a very promising day, weather wise.

The first cache was not too far from the road and a nice easy find. We then carried on down the road to the start of the path up the hill. The next few caches were quick finds and we were soon at the trigpoint at the top of the hill. I'd been here ages ago as the trigpoint is one that counts towards the Ye Olde Survey Monuments cache. That time it was in thick fog and I could hardly see in front of my nose, let alone see for miles like we could today.

The next one appeared to be down the other side of the hill, off the path, so off we set for some off-roading as there was no obvious route to it. We then met us with a path that was following the contours of the hill further down the bank. This lead us to GZ and then onwards to the rest of the caches, all of which were nice easy finds (apart from one, where we had to use a PAF and then kicked ourselves as we'd missed a very obvious hide - doh!).

After we'd finished the Waltons series, we headed round to the start of the climb up the Clent Hills and onwards to the new National Trust caches. On the way we bagged a couple of other caches, one of which was aptly named OUCH! as it was in the middle of a gorse bush!

The National Trust caches were all really big tupperware containers with tons of interesting things in them like cards helping you identify birds that you might see and cards showing you the different kinds of clouds and how to recognise each type. We spent quite a while enjoying the tasks that were in the caches before moving on.

The only problem we did have with the National Trust caches was on #2 which we could not find. All of the caches did not have any hints, although is not usually a big problem as there are usually only so many places you can hide a big box. Number 2 might be missing and without a hint it's really hard to know if you missed something obvious.

We also bumped into The Twilleys 2 at one of the caches. Great to meet you both.

After we'd completed our circular walk and arrived back at the Jeep, we set off to try the new Bromsgrove Feeder series. These are all situated around the main road between Kidderminster and Bromsgrove and while not exactly scenic, had fun challenges of their own - namely, how the heck to get to most of them without going on the main road (it's a dual carriageway with nowhere to stop).

At the second of the caches, we spotted some suspicious figures as we approached that just had to be cachers. They turned out to be monkeyhanger. We had a nice chat while we all searched for the cache.

We found all but about 3 of the series as those were on the west-bound carriageway and we did not want to double back on ourselves. The last one we did was at a lovely location by the side a sand quarry, with great views over the quarry itself. It was also an ammo box, so a very nice cache to finish the series on :-).

Next, we decided to head over to a cluster of un-founds on the far side of Bromsgrove and picked up a couple of drive-by's on the way.

As we approached one cache, we spotted some familiar faces but could not place them. It was Ailec Nor, who we'd last bumped into at the M1 J30 cache when we were on our way to the Mega Event in Harrogate last summer. Great to meet you both again.

The rest of the caches were uneventful apart from bumping into yet another cacher: acring.

Isaac was then soon guiding us to the nearest junction of the M5 (but not before we grabbed a final cache on the way) and the journey northwards to home.

36 finds for the day, 4 different caching teams met and wall to wall sunshine all day. A great day out!