Fullarton House Estate

The sun was out this afternoon so we jumped in the car and drove down to Fullarton House Estate on the outskirts of Troon. Fullarton House was built by William Fullarton in 1745 on the site of Crosbie Castle. In 1805  it was sold to the Duke of Portland who established Troon and built the harbour from where he shipped coal from his mines in the Kilmarnock area. To transport the coal to Troon, he even constructed a railway line which also became the first passenger carrying line in Scotland. Part of this railway still exists today but today forms a section of the Glasgow to Ayr line.

Fullarton house itself was sold to the council in 1928 but unfortunately they decided to demolish the house in 1966. Today the stable block is still present, these having been converted into flats in the 70's. Where the main house once stood lies present day visitor car park. Two large stone pediments which once stood at either end of the front facade also remain.

Our first target of the day was collected before we even arrived. The Fullarton Woods cache is situated right at the point at which we arrived at the estate so to save ourselves a walk we stopped the car and went to find it. The location is fairly obvious when you get there and sure enough the log was soon signed and we were on our way again.

After a visit to the play park and the nearby grotto (left) we took a wander into the woods again in search of Brusha Brusha (twice a day) which is a strangely named cache with no relation to its name aside from the fact that the cache is hidden in a hole (or cavity) in a tree. The problem here was that we were under tree cover with no GPS signal and there were dozens of trees to choose from. Luckily there was a photo of the correct tree online but even with this it took some effort. Tree located, this one was left for Fiona to search and she soon had the cache.

Finally we took a lovely wander along to the bridle path at the Troon end of the estate and followed it around to a small burn where a small wooden bridge has been built over to another path. Bridge With a View (Candy Cache) was simple to locate and is named after the type of container used to store the log. The view here is out of the woods and over the fields towards Loans.

We had planned to do more caches today but Mrs Super Collector wasn't feeling too great. Instead we headed back to the play park and then home for a night in front of the TV.

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