Looking down on Tittesworth Reservoir and the area we'd been caching in earlier in the day from the top of the Roaches.
We could not decide where to go caching this weekend, so after a good look at our unfound caches on Memory Map, we settled on a trip to Leek as there seemed to be tons of caches there to find. There has been a circular walk just north of the town along the Staffordshire Moorlands Walk (SMW) for quite a while now and we’ve been meaning to do it for ages, but wanted some other caches to fill the rest of the day with. Now was our chance…
Love the reflections in the pond in the park at the start of the SMW walk
We parked up as suggested at the Leisure Centre at the start of the SMW series and headed off on foot. Along the way we picked up two other caches in the park before heading out to a lane and then onwards up a hill over farmland. At the top we were treated to some great 360 degree views with the Roaches, Shutlingsloe and the town of Leek being the main things of interest.
Simply stunning countryside. What a great place for caches and a really nice walk!
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The trail then lead us down towards Tittesworth Rerservoir (isn’t this where the Top Gear crew filmed that daft challenge where they had to convert cars into boats and sail them?). There is another series of 5 caches round the reservoir, so we picked up 3 of them at this stage and opted to do the remaining 2 later in the day.
Lone tree at the high point in the SMW walk
Once back at the Jeep, we decided to head off for some urban caches around Leek. We opted for an anti-clockwise circular route around the suburbs and don’t really have a lot to add about the caches ;-).
Shutlingsloe in the distance
Once we’d had enough of the urban caches (and had almost run out of ones to do anyway), we headed off to the top end of Tittesworth Rerservoir for the remaining two caches in that series, plus another stand-alone cache which we were passing on the way.
It's a Long Walk 😉
To finish the day on a proper note, we decided to head up into the Peak District (we were on the border of it anyway by now) and have a walk along the Roaches, taking in the caches along there including Staffordshire’s Highest Cache. After the urban caching, this proved to be just what we needed and we had a really fun couple of hours enjoying the amazing views, watching the (many) rock climbers and finding the caches.
Isaac at the Rockall Cottage cache, with Hen Cloud in the background
After we’d got back to the Jeep we decided to stop for 3 quick caches to the west of Stoke on Trent before picking off a cache near home that was published last night.
Views over Tittesworth Reservoir from the dam
42 finds for the day and a lovely varied days’ caching with great weather all day. Great stuff :-).
Panoramic views from the trigpoint on the Roaches
Here is a link to the Everytrail plot of our route.
