Stewarton Woods

Just to the South West of Stewarton in Ayrshire there's a nice little circular woodland walk on which there are three caches which I visited today.


The first of these was Pickens Parked at Kirkmuir which is a simple cache to find at the side of a nice new woodland path. This was easy to find so not much to mention. The other caches were a little more challenging. The first problem came when, trying to park, I managed to reverse into a post. I gained one small dent in the van and one bad mood but decided to carry on and find the other two caches.

SWAT's Long Wood took me a while to find. The clue is really good, however phone reception is poor and my GPS was up to it's tricks so I spent a while searching in the wrong place. Once I'd figured that out I quickly found the cache and really enjoyed using the method described in the clue to find the cache. This involved looking along the hollow inside of a fallen tree to reveal the hiding place.

The final cache on this walk was Annick! Beware Cunninghames! which is further along the path. Once at the general location a second path heads off into the bushes and a good rummage was required to locate the cache.

Back to the van and I moved on to another nearby cache, The Lambroughton March. This is the name of an old tree which has a gap between it's two main trunks. The fence on either side of the tree does not cover this gap so the woodland beyond can be accessed by climbing through the tree. Finding the cache was much harder than accessing the wood however. The coordinates had me looking for a "small but clear path" and took me down to the river edge. First, there was no path whatsoever, and second the cache is nowhere near the water! I finally found the cache close to the tree by which I'd entered the wood and could have got there without any climbing up and down the steep slope!