Little Quest - Staffordshire

Monday April 5th 2010

Staffordshire is one of those counties that we know quite a bit about having lived here for some years, to us it will always be known as the Potteries, home of Stoke on Trent. Staffordshire in this humble Shiltonpigs opinion is a county that gets overlooked...for example a few years ago I was reading a travel guide to mainland UK. It had two short paragraphs about Staffordshire where it recommended seeing 3 places....(Alton Towers, Lichfield Cathedral and Burton Brewery Centre). That to me seems a bit harsh as while Staffordshire certainly is a county with an industrial past it has many delights.

One of those delights took us to the Staffordshire leg of Little Quest. Little Quest caches are like buses at the moment, we haven't done any in years and then we do 4 in the space of a week. (Still haven't a clue how the co-ords in each one will lead us to the final cache). This cache led us to Hem Heath which is pretty close to Trentham. This area of Stoke on Trent is by far the prettiest area, couldn't believe it that on the same road as these woods, we saw thatched cottages??? in Stoke on Trent???? is this real? But it was, so there was a shock for a start.

Living in the National Forest, we have grown used to woods which have very young trees, so it was a nice change to have a walk around a very pleasant mature woods in Stoke. Again we are just a little early for any bluebells that will no doubt appear any time soon. The cache in question was a mere 0.2 of a mile away from where we had walked, Josh had woken up and seemed in good spirits as we meandered down the wooden path...its rained and rained so much recently that no matter where you walk in this country at the moment its muddy.

The cache in question is situated by an ancient pond that has been there since time began...or something like that.More info on Hem Heath woods. The stone that Mr Shiltonpig is leaning on used to an old fence post to a field, but the fields have long gone and this pretty woodland has come up instead. It was nice and quiet this morning, we only bumped into 1 muggle who was out walking her dog. Poor old Mr Shiltonpig was down on his hands and knees getting very dirty for this cache...but he soon had it in his hand and another cache was chalked off the list.

This means in total we have covered 214 miles round trip on our merry adventures around mainland England. This cache was in a pleasant location and in the best area of Stoke, but feel that there are other places in Staffordshire that could show what it has to offer...the Roaches in the North or Kinver in the South being just some of the examples we could think of. Bit like this entry in my blog, not terrible, but not the best that weve written either. Having said that the quests need to take you on what sums England up, so far we have visited 3 villages, so some variety is nice. So which Little Quest is next on our list? watch this space!