Geocaching at Harcourt Arboretum

I have never been geocaching before. Didn't want to. Didn't see the point - why ruin a perfectly good country walk by bringing along a piece of beeping technology to interfere with everything? Mostly, I still think that, but having allowed my husband (a geek of the first order), and my 5 year-old daughter (full of the enthusiasm one has at that age) to convince me to try it, I find myself forced to admit that my one and only experience of geocaching, at the Harcourt Arboretum near Oxford yesterday, was actually really good fun. I'm blushing at the admission, but there it is. Even in the pouring rain, I enjoyed it. And it wasn't quite what I expected.

It's part of the Arboretum's series of family activities for the summer holidays, and there are two trails, designed with the Institute of Physics. We chose the longer trail, with ten caches, which took about 2 hours. We were thankful for our wellies, waterproofs, and an all-terrain buggy, in which our 18 month-old slept most of the way round; at her pace it might have taken us about 4 times as long.

So why did I enjoy it? Well firstly, the kit is not too complicated, even for a Luddite like me. The only problem with the GPS unit is that you have to be moving for it to work, so you have to pick a random direction at first and set off confidently, so that in 10 yards or so you can change direction equally confidently once the kit has worked out where you are. It took us on a lovely convoluted route round the meadow and amongst the trees, and not knowing where we would be sent next added a pleasing air of mystery. The ten caches were hidden in army surplus waterproof tins, containing a log book and an activity designed by the Institute of Physics, and it was this aspect that was most interesting.

I'm not in any way a physicist, having given up formal study of the subject at the tender age of 14 due to some spectacularly poor advice at school, but these were perfectly accessible to me, and the practical nature really appealed to our 5 year-old - in one activity she got to pretend to be a bat, echo-locating insects (the rest of us standing round her in a circle responding to her "beep beep" with our own!). We also loved the one about thin-film interference, which explains the way we see the fabulous colours of peacock feathers (peacocks being a feature of the Arboretum), and had a pair of sheets of polarising film with which to make mosaics:

All in all, a brilliant couple of hours, and an activity that I would highly recommend, even if you don't think of yourself as the geocaching kind!

Harcourt Arboretum
Institute of Physics
The Geocaching Association of Great Britain (GAGB)