The Tresco stage's location changed in August 2021. Add 0.012 to the minutes of the Westings given in the St Mary's stage.
The oldest active multi cache in the U.K. was adopted by pljg on 1st October 2020, when it was 6965 days old.
We have kept the original cache page as it is for now, including the spoilers, but:
Please "find" this in the spirit of the cache and find all four stages.
Feel free to log "notes" if you only find individual stages and we will leave the physical log books in the first three stages but St Agnes is the final and you should find all four stages to log a genuine find. It took us almost exactly four years and ten notes to finish all four stages of the cache, although we didn't do it in order, making the final find on St Martin's on 5th August 2016.
Here are the cache's stats as of October 2020:
- The U.K.'s oldest active multi cache. Only London's "Sherlock" series also dates from 2001.
- But only the Isles of Scilly's second oldest cache and it used to be the 4th oldest.
- 4th oldest cache in the southwest, 19th in England and 25th in the UK.
- 15th oldest multi in Europe and 87th oldest in the world.
- 2065th oldest cache in world.
The Isles of Scilly are situated 28 miles to the west of Lands End. To get there you can take the ferry from Penzance or a small plane from Land's End, Newquay or Exeter. We would definitely recommend flying from Land's End, which only takes 20 minutes. To keep costs down stay at The Garrison camping site.
It took us 3 days to set up this multicache and we estimate that it should be relatively easy to find it in the same time, the limiting factor is the boats between the islands. These leave from St Mary's each morning between around 10:15 but you can really get to only one island per day. We would definitely suggest that you look for the first cache as soon as you arrive on St Mary's.
To help you plan a bit the order of the caches is St Mary's, Tresco, St Martins and St Agnes. We realise that this may not be possible for everyone so there is a spoiler for St Martin's and St Agnes below.
In terms of terrain. A good deal of walking is required but all of the caches are hidden either at ground level or require a small scramble on granite tors. As the islands are relatively small only a normal level of fitness is required. The islands enjoy an extremely mild climate but weather can change rather abruptly so have some cold/wet weather gear with you.
Recently there have been a couple of incidents of 'missing next cache co-ordinates' for the last two caches. So, to avoid disappointment we have added the coordinates of St Martins and St Agnes in the spoiler below.