Tom the Botanist

On Sunday, Lauren and I decided to go on a micro-adventure to explore some of the old churches in the Teme Valley. We planned the route around Geocaches located at each site, giving us a goal for the day’s adventure.

Abberley

Our first stop was St. Mary’s Church in Abberley, where we stopped off and had a mooch around the grounds. The search for the geocache took us to the adjacent Millennium Green. After checking four or five potential candidates, Lauren found it lodged in an ivy-covered tree, where the tree had actually started to engulf the container into its bark.

Shelsley Walsh

The second stop was St. Andrew’s Church in Shelsley Walsh, a 12th-century church built just above the River Teme’s floodplain. The Shelsley Walsh parish is steeped in history, with local folklore about hauntings at the nearby Court House.

There’s also the legend of Witchery Hole, a patch of woodland South of the church, where it’s said witches were burned and as a result nothing grows.

Stockton-on-Teme

After having a look around the Court House and old mill pond, we moved on to our third stop at Stockton-on-Teme’s St. Andrew’s Church.

The hint for this cache was ‘Of China, once Berlin’, which led us to guess it was located in the wall, where we found the small geocache, lodged tightly in the dry stone wall of the churchyard.

Clows Top

On our way to the next location, travelling up through Pensax, we decided to stop at The Bell. We had a pint of cider, a pint of Coke, and shared two packets of crisps in the beer garden before heading over to Clows Top.

Here we found a Mission Room, a more recent church from 1895. We found the geocache for this stop in an old yew tree just outside the church on the lane. From the modest church, the view west to Titterstone Clee was spectacular.

‘A Fine Pair’ Bayton Common

Our fifth cache of the day was found back through Bayton Common. The cache, titled ‘A Fine Pair’, referred to the red phone box and red post box standing next to each other. The geocache was placed inside the phone box, on top of the old phone unit which has now been repurposed to house a defibrillator. From there, we drove back through Far Forest, and Callow Hill before heading home.