I was so chuffed, I had my first cassette Sony walkman in black....my sister had one in red, it was ace, I could listen to the Pet Shop Boys all day and my sister could listen to Rick Astley. This was an age before ipods, cds, dvds, mobile phones, internet, xbox and of course the good old gps...yes this was an age when Mr Shiltonpig was Master Shiltonpig, an age before the electronic revolution had begun! It is only recently upon discovery of the photo to the left that I realised that my love of geocaching was based upon a childhood memory...
On our annual summer holiday in Dartmoor, Devon, Mr Shiltonpigs father took the family to an area outside of Okehampton. He must at some point have come across letterboxing. Letterboxing is the 19th and 20th Centuries form of geocaching...basically a man by the name of William Crossing in 1854 (around about the time Mrs Shiltonpig was born) wrote in his Dartmoor book that another man James Perrott had placed a bottle for visitors cards at a remote place. This single event led to more boxes being placed in remote places and by the latter half of the 20th Century Dartmoor was full of them...well not quite full otherwise you would be tripping over them as you walked over the moor. Using a map (for those of an age that cannot remember a time before gps, a map was a piece of paper that you could carry around that helped you locate yourself on lol).
My father decided to take his family on a trek through Dartmoor to the site of the first letterbox, a place called Cranmere Pool. Now you can read more about Cranmere Pool at one of my great links and its well worth it....for a start Cranmere Pool is described as "wet, boggy tract of land with possibly a pathetic muddy pond or a dried up peaty mess, depending on the rainfall". Just the place to take the family on holiday!! Now the first time we went through (please note the emphasis on the word first) we got lost, we went off course and lets just say the wellies that you see in the first photo came very much into force. It was cold, it was raining, it was misty and we were damp.
Now before I get told off by my dear parents, I have to say that some parts of this story have become a little vague....but why let the facts get in the way of a good story. So after the first time and getting so lost and wet, what was the sensible decision to make? Yes thats right a few days later we tried again....this is where we came across the army, for some reason they were also in the area and on their way to Cranmere Pool. The Sergeant Major was very nice and pleasant and his map reading skills were better than ours and so we finally got there....and when we did, what did we see? Yes thats right the photo on the right, an old battered Victorian Letterbox, which incidentally is still used as a post box. Why do I know that? Because we sent ourselves a postcard saying "we made it"...not sure why we did that as it was no surprise a week or two later when we received a postcard saying "we made it"...however the very nice General (he had been promoted I'm sure of it) had written on it "So did we". And that was the end of the adventure to a cold, wet, waterless pool in the middle of nowhere.
However 20 years later the fun we had had as a family looking for this letterbox was brought back into the fore when I came across geocaching and wanted to recreate more of those memories. So now I have my own family and history repeats itself as I carry Josh on my shoulders and get Mrs Shiltonpig lost in the middle of nowhere on a cold wet day, but just like when I was a kid, we have lots of fun together and I wouldn't have had it any other way then or now. So while I have ditched my Sony walkman for my ipod (though I still listen to Pet Shop Boys occasionally, yes sad I know) and my map for a gps...I still pose looking stupid in photos....some things will never change!
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