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

S"troll" around Thringstone

Sunday April 4th 2010

Having a child is never an easy experience (just ask my parents). Josh at times can be a challenge...for example when its time for his sleepy in an afternoon what does he go and do? stay awake...so two tired parents give in and decide to take him out for some geocaching. The photo on the left is captured in desperation as Mr Shiltonpig has had enough (for any social services or concerned readers looking at this, please note that Josh was never hurt, we love him very much and is currently back in his dungeon...oops sorry cot sound asleep).

Have you ever drove through a village, thought "mmm thats a nice village" carried on driving and never thought of that place again? you have I am sure of it. However today we broke a trend, we have made a stand and said no more! We must visit a village properly...and so we did and were glad we did. Thringstone has pages upon pages on it on wikipedia if you don't believe me click on the link (can't believe you don't believe me) and so is obviously a village with a lot of history to tell. The cache in question, was a multi cache, one that requires that you go and collect info around the town before you find the cache. Mr Shiltonpig points to a sign that says "Please clean up after your Dog"...in our case we have to clean up after Josh (yes thats right he poo'ed again).

One of the interesting places that the cache took us was to a graveyard and to the final resting place of Charles Booth he helped document working class life in London and changed government policy on poverty in the early 20th century. His gravestone is one of the nicest we have ever read...I would quote it, but then some things you must see for yourself. From time to time carrying Josh on my shoulders can be a challenge, so we like to let him down and let him run on his own for a while. Problem is to a 1 year old everything is exciting...Josh has 3 things at the moment that he likes....sticks, he will chase us pretending the stick is a snake. Next up, stones...nothing exciting about them, but he will just carry them around.

Lastly he loves flowers, he could spend ages looking at them...he takes after his dad in that respect (hopefully he will take after his mom, and be actually be able to name them all). Now for regular readers of this blog you may remember the exclusive we brought you about the troll on Sinfin Moor, well it seems we have been able to capture another world exclusive...the wife of the Sinfin Moor Troll captured in photo for the 1st time. Puts the "troll" into the word stroll (Clever ah...we thought it was good too!!) The cache took us to Grace Dieu woods and we were just a little early as bluebells will blossom here any day now.

The cache should have taken about an hour to complete, but clearly this was without the Josh factor. Changing nappies stop, cake stop, juice stop, trainer falling off stop, kicking daddy stop...this all adds up to extra time and in fact it took 25 hours 42 minutes and 3 seconds. But the fact is we did find it...and by now Josh loves to open the cache and empty all the contents out...he is very helpful, and teach them while they are young thats what we say! This was a cache unlike others that we have done before, reminds you that caching is about digging that little bit deeper and finding out about the history and places that you live around. So wherever you live, take some time out to learn about you town, village or city, you may be surprised by what you uncover.

So for all you froggy fans out there as promised an update on how they all are. Within 24 hours half had hatched fully and within 48 hours all of them had. They have grown so quickly that we now have 3 pots with them all in, some of them are getting so big now and have grown so quickly that you can start to see some kind of froggy face on them. A few even have very small legs on them....its crazy we have only had them 4.5 days and yet the speed at which they are growing has even amazed us. Josh loves them, he can even say tadpole now, and makes fish noises whenever he sees them.