Grace Dieu Priory

Toad of Toad Hall

 Sunday August 15th 2010

After a holiday, its back down to earth...and in just a few short days again you wish you were back on holiday again. This sadly wasn't going to happen anytime soon, so next best thing is to go geocaching. We had tried to go and do these caches the day before...but the summer rain continues and so we tried again today. Today our journeys would take us a short journey up the road back to the village of Thringstone. The couple that had given us some frogspawn earlier in the year had set a very good local cache in a well known spot....Grace Dieu

Rusty Mary

 Priory. Grace Dieu Priory is in ruins, but provides plenty of stories even to this day. For example the BBC investigated whether ghosts lived here. Well no ghosts today, but we did find a toad....granted a small one, but a pleasant find none the less. The cache takes you on a sad tale around the priory. It appears that when Henry 8th was on the throne, this priory was under threat of closure by the king. It had evaded this in the past by being a good place....however it appears that one of the nuns that lived at the priory ended up with an illegitimate child by the local land owner. The King was not best pleased and used this as an excuse to put to end the 2 lovers lives. A little ironic for a man that had 6 wives and created his own religion to marry another woman. What is more interesting is that it appears that this local spot may have been used as a religious site before the priory even existed. Theories go that a pagan site once lay here because of natural occuring phenomenon. In fact the priory ruins lie on top of a geological fault known as Thringstone fault. What is exciting to

It had been in 1 piece before Josh arrived

 think about is that there may be a genuine reason why so many people claim to see strange things here. I will leave it up to the reader to determine what exactly is the truth...but either way makes for a great place to put a cache. And further proof to an earlier post that this village is very interesting. Anyway the cache took us to Rusty Mary where we found something on the floor...it wasn't supposed to be there and we were fortunate to find it. This then led us to another part of the ruins where we learned more about the place. Finally with all this information at hand we were able to put our hands on the cache.

Josh wants to take some stones home

 We had other ideas for where we would like to put our hands....and that was in the brambles, thats right folks this is blackberry season and the first were up for grabs. Those nappy bags came in handy as we filled them up with black goodies! We then went to the village of Thringstone to find a couple more caches in the area...those blackberries were crying out for some companionship...they were lonely already. The blackberries were in luck...we found an apple tree that was on public land, and we soon found some more uses for those nappy bags. Sadly we had to use one for Joshs stinky nappy as well, but hey you win some and you lose some.

Not impressed with the hedge...

That meant only one thing...a crumble, which at the time of writing has already been consumed and a mighty fine one it was too! Another cache that finished us off the day took us out to the rural Leicestershire countryside and into a hedge. The co-ords were a little way out for us, which led to quite a search....but Mr Shiltonpig came to the rescue and saved the day.

Nappy bags helped make our crumble