Exploring Whaley Bridge

We had a very nice lie-in this morning (no ty-gers were available), and didn't surface until eight. The weather was still quite revolting, the rain pouring down, so we took our time over breakfast, and had just resigned ourselves to postponing the Treasure Trail until the afternoon when it cleared up.

Accordingly, we togged up, shoved the waterproofs in a daysack and set out. The trail started in the Canal Basin car park, and was advertised as taking 90 minutes. This proved a touch optimistic; it had been a bit before half ten when we set out to do it, and it was gone noon before we finished. Sheila tells me that this interfered with the calm contemplation of the final few clues a bit, as I was getting very peckish and so quite stroppy.

/blush

We ended with two clues we couldn't crack out of the twenty, but decided to finish off back at the boat. We nipped into Tesco for some sandwiches to save time getting lunch, as well as other necessaries of life, and headed back.

After lunch, we used the text support system to get the final two clues, and were able to confirm on-line that we had got all the others right, admittedly one of them by inspired guess work.

So what did we think of the Trail?

It was a neat way of exploring Whaley Bridge, and we found one or two bits we'd not seen before. The scheme is advertised as suitable for supervised children, but they would need a lot of supervision and a fair bit of help. There were busy roads to be crossed a couple of times, and we two, who are not tyros when it comes to intellectual puzzles or stuff like geocaching, found it quite challenging at times.

The fictional back story involved a cache of gold coins hidden by a Roman legionary called Bigus Loserous (puh-leeese!) which felt a bit unnecessary, frankly. It would have been enough just to set out the stuff as a list of clues to be solved and crossed off. I find it improbable that anyone with enough intelligence to tackle the trail would need the added inducement of this CBeebies level "story" to motivate them to finish.

There is a set of walks in and around Whaley Bridge, some waymarked and others not, that you can find out about by spending a pound in the local PO or Tourist Info type places for the leaflet, and frankly that's much better value than £5.99 for the one 1.5 mile trail.

Having said that, it was fun in its way and filled a morning with healthy exercise.

We've been relaxing back at the boat since; another quiet night tonight, then away in the morning heading back towards Poynton over the next two days. The forecast is for lots of rain, and it's my turn to steer, but that's just how it goes, I guess.

/nobigdeal