Millennium Time Trail #002 T5 17/20 Multi-Cache

This is a simple offset-multi geocache.

The published coordinates take you to a Mile-Post marker on a cycle path of the National Cyle Network. This mile-post carries a game disk from the Millenium Time Trail project. The final coordinates, found by solving the clues below, is less than half of a mile away and consists of a medium-sized clip-lock container with plenty of room for normal sized trackable and swappables.

The Millennium Time Trail was a fascinating project developed by Sustrans to celebrate the year 2000 Millennium and promote Sustainable Transport through the National Cycle Network.

Unfortunately, in less than two decades since the project was launched it has been all but forgotten, even by Sustrans. Much of the original material has been lost and few people now remember the aims of the project or what the remaining posts and plaques represent.

Sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland, 1,000 marker posts were commissioned, in four basic designs. These were to be positioned around the country’s National Cycle Network. These posts were each to carry a circular plaque - game pieces in the Millennium Time Trail. A total of 50 different disks were designed for the main part of the trail and ten different disks in a supplemental ‘Rare Disk’ series. People were to be encouraged to collect rubbings of each one to earn special Time Souvenirs from Sustrans. As the marker posts were to be distributed around the whole country ti would be difficult for any person to visit every marker post so the country was divided into nine regions and each region would contain at least two of each disk in the entire set. It would therefore be possible to ‘collect’ the entire set within a single region.

The disks are collected into five different ‘series’:

1. T1 – set of four – “The Seasons”
2. 2. T2 – set of six – “The Continents”
3. 3. T3 – set of eight – “The Ages of Man”
4. 4. T4 – set of twelve – “The Signs of the Zodiac”
5. 5. T5 – set of twenty – “The Centuries”

There is also an additional series of ‘Rare’ disks (I believe this contains ten different designs, but I may be wrong) which contain clues to solve additional elements of the puzzle.

Each disk carries an image relating to the theme of the series. This image is surrounded by a segment of a poem written in cipher based on St. Thomas More’s Utopian alphabet. The entire poem (shown below) is divided amongst the fifty disks in the main five series.

Although records are incomplete, Sustrans have stated that they believe that only one person ever completed the entire quest.

The post at this location is a design “Fossil Tree” by John Mills. The post takes the form of an abstract tree, inspired by Sigillaria, an extinct tree-like plant with a tall, occasionally forked trunk, whose fossils are commonly found in Carboniferous deposits (about 270 million years ago). The post features imagery of fossils depicting the passage of time from early primitive creatures to the ultimate demise of fossil fuel driven technology.

The disk carried by this post is from series T5 (The Centuries). This series comprises of twenty disks, each representing one of the centuries in the millennium being celebrated. This is disk 17 of 20, representing the seventeenth century.

The image is dominated by Sir Isaac Newton's work. His early work on the periods of Pendulums, his work on optics (which started with him splitting light into the rainbow spectrum with a prism and a falling apple to the right representing his insight into the nature of gravity.
Additional seventeenth century events are represented by a skull with a quill (Shakespeare's Hamlet was written right at the beginning of the century) and the flames behind the prism representing the Great Fire of London (1666).

The cipher around the image represents the fragment of the Time Trail poem shown in red below. The entire poem is divided up amongst all the fifty disks in the first five series.

MEASURE EVERY HEARTBEAT TO COUNT OUT OUR LIFE’S SCORE
IS “TIME TO ESCAPE” MEANT TO FIRE OUR COMING AGE?
LOCKED IN SEASONS’ BARS SWINGS PENDULUM’S CEASELESS CLAY
LUNGS NEVER FULL ENSNARE US IN TIME’S EIGHT PIECE CAGE
ENTROPY’S AIM SHOOTS LEPTONS IN DANCING CYCLES OF LIGHT
NATIONS REACH OUT IN HOPE ACROSS TIME ZONES AND LONG DEGREES
NO CORNERS TO HIDE US, EARTH’S SHADE SPINS HOURLY ROUND TONIGHT
IN ALL MIND-STREAMS WE WADE, OUR WORLD-LINES WEAVE PAST TAPESTRIES
UNCERTAIN DREAMS EVOLVE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE “WHY?”
MUST IN ALL THESE TIDES OF FAITH, FLOW STILL SUCH WAVES OF FEARS?
PLACE AND TIME TEMPT FATES, BUT ALL LIFE’S NATURE IS TO DIE
OUR ERA, STARS, BOWS OUT, PLAYING ITS MUSICAL SPHERES
EVERY GAINED UTOPIAN GOAL MAKES US MANIFOLD TIME’S TREASURE
MAPPED OUT, AS ABOVE SO BELOW, NERGAL TICKS OFF TIME’S MEASURE