Little Quest - Rutland

Thursday April 1st 2010

As we drove from the A50 from Leicester and finally joined the A47 (in the right direction), the dual carriageway became a single carriageway, later the single carriageway became one lane for all traffic and finally the tarmac just gave out and a dirt track lay out in front of us. Yes folks, we had left the big bad city behind and we were in the country...in the country normal rules don't apply, they don't accept plastic, you must wear wellies and of course you can only drink cider. Ok, ok enough of the country bashing for a short time....lets focus on the task at hand...the little quest cache. So we arrived in Englands smallest county...Rutland...so apart from the fact that it has a reservoir thats all we knew about it. Pretty ignorant really....but we learned more along the way....and shall we say that we were converts by the end of the weekend! For more info on Rutland...click on one of Mr Shiltonpigs amazing links (super duper linky poo).

So if you haven't guessed by now, we ended up in the village of North Luffenham. Josh had only been out the car 2 minutes when he decided to look at the flowers, its his new favourite word at the moment. Mrs Shiltonpig had nipped into the pub....we won't say why. Most of Rutland is built with lime or ironstone, which pretty much makes it picturesque and North Luffenham is no exception. Thatched cottages, quaint church and old houses, make it the type of place that we wish we had put on our Sunday best....instead we just wore fleeces...oh well...we won't be invited to the Womens Institute any time soon.

What made this cache special was the history and in this humble team Shiltonpigs opinion was very atmospheric. Basically in 1642 (Mrs Shiltonpig was going through puberty then) a siege occured in the town, when hoardes of Parliamentarian (is that even a word??) forces descended upon here to capture Henry Noel a local man who clearly had sympathy with the Royalists (hindsight is such a wonderful thing). These days the only hoardes that descend here are the very very smart dolled up mothers who come to collect their children from school (probably just as rowdy though). Anyway it appears there was some kind of scuffle ( no, no not the mothers the civil war...try and keep up!) and someone was killed here, and damage was done to the inside of the church, which can be seen to this day.

In some ways life in the village hasn't really changed, and that is a compliment. The cache in question took us on a very cold April fools day afternoon to a small stream in the village. Of course in true team Shiltonpig style we walked in completely the wrong footpath to get to the cache and had to walk over a fence to get here. It was a cool cache, held on in place by some kind of strong lead. Josh is beginning to understand caching, in his own little way. He likes opening the boxes and looking inside, pulling all the contents out and he knows to put them all back without complaining....clever kid.

We love this photo of Josh as he is standing like a man, looking trendy...not that his parents would know anything about being trendy. We came to Rutland without any high expectations, but fell in love with the place...nobody really mentions Rutland, its one of those counties that gets overlooked....and perhaps thats a good thing, one of those secrets only know to those who are local or who have visited. Mr Shiltonpig has decided that he wants to retire here....its going to take him till he retires to save up the money to move here. We recommend that if you haven't been to this neck of the world that you start planning to come here...stop reading this and start looking at the Travelodge website!!! So in total so far 85.5 miles travelled on our Little Quest adventure....2 down, 45 more counties and the bonus cache to go...onwards and upwards...