A Fine Cathedral, but not a City
Disa Urq was hosting a Community Celebration event over in Bury St Edmunds. Those are quite rare beasts, so combined with St Edmundsbury being an English cathedral I’d never visited, I snapped up the opportunity to go. Bury St Edmunds is one of a number of English settlements that have a cathedral but which are not a city. Another is Southwell, where I went to school. But I digress.
Setting Off
The plan was to meet Candleford and Makaraka at some awful time of the morning, and to grab a couple of caches with peculiar D/T ratings near Stow cum Quy on the way. The event in Bury St Edmunds wasn’t until quite late in the morning, so we reckoned we could get a dawn walk in and also walk around Bury before the event started.
At Stow cum Quy we did also walk over to a cache that’s a field puzzle. It was one of those three-dimensional mazes made by a 3-D printer. They are quite cunning, but to be honest if you don’t figure it out in the first few seconds you could be there for ages. We gave up after 30 minutes, because we just weren’t getting any closer to a solution and we had other things we wanted to do. I knew we shouldn’t have walked to it.
Bury St Edmunds
Ah! The home of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, which like many English cathedrals, is actually a mish-mash of styles and ages. It’s had more extensions added to it than you could get away with and didn’t actually become a cathedral until 1914.
None of us had been caching here before, so potentially anything and everything was on the radar. Parking looked variable, and we had some information it might be possible to park free at the station. You could park for free. However, you had to get a “free” ticket out of the machine to put in your window. That took some time to figure out.
So off we went for a bit of a walk around town. There were three sets of Ad Labs on top of a selection of Church Micros, War Memorials, and other typical “in town” caches. This kept us busy until over halfway past the start of the event, but we had decided to complete chunks of the walk before going to the event, so that’s what we did.
The event was in the cathedral gardens, at the furthest point from the car. The walk back was quicker though, because we’d done all the caches apart from a couple.
Car Time
After Bury, we’d decided to head for Newmarket, but to get there via Barrow, where there was a set of labs as well as a Village Sign, a Village Hall, Church Micro and a War Memorial. That’s got to be worth a trip. As it turned out, it was a pretty quick way of grabbing 10 finds.
Where They Do the Horses
Newmarket wouldn’t really be worthy of much note except that it’s considered to be the original home of, and still a major global centre for, thoroughbred horse racing. Not a sport I’m interested in, other than the geographical aspects. The geography of things is always interesting to me. It’s what I do. But the actual racing of horses, and the wagering of money on it, are of no interest to me.
Anyway, we got there around the main road and followed a long straight road alongside some of the gallops. It has a bunch of caches at places that were (cough) suitable for Candleford to park at.
Once we got into the town centre there was a set of Ad Labs that required walking. So we parked “behind the shops” and went for a bit of a walk. It was a short walk around a smallish town centre. And then once we were done with that we drove to the west end of the main street to finish off one of the sets of labs. By this time it was nearly 5pm and it was getting close to darkness.
Well, we can’t finish yet
Well, just because it’s dark, that doesn’t mean we have to stop.
So Candleford “forced” us to do another set of Ad Labs in Eaton Socon as part of the drive back to her house (where me and Makaraka had parked). Well, it would be rude not to.
In total, the day yielded 71 finds, which was somewhat more than I’d anticipated. I was only expecting 30-40, but that was based on us only going to Bury St Edmunds. Adding all the others into that pushed me well clear of my expectation.
