We seem to have inadvertently created a series of caches in, or near some of the parks and green spaces in West Bletchley so we've decided to group them as "Bletchley's Parks"!
There's a small wood just off Sherwood Drive that our kids (aka The Cool Kid Cachers) like to call Sherwood Forest and they thought it would be fun to hide a geocache there.
The wood has been there for over 150 years when it was part of the nearby Home Farm (also known as The Croft) and adjacent to (if not part of) the Bletchley Park estate. The cottages adjoining the suggested parking also date from this time.
The history of this area goes back even further, to Roman times. An excavation in 1972/3 when they were building the nearby office building (Challenge House) identified a Roman building, probably a farm, and a potential Villa site was found in aerial photos of the playing fields. Subsequent geophysics analysis of the field undertaken in 2003 revealed some faint anomalies but nothing worth digging for, the conclusion being that later ploughing and other use of the ground had destroyed the bulk of the archaeology.
In 1983 an artwork was installed nearby called "The Art of Silence" by Bernard Schottlander, one of the lesser known of the 230+ public art pieces dotted around Milton Keynes.
This little wood is frequented by the local children (we were "shot" by laser pistols when scoping out the site for this cache!) and potentially overlooked by the adjacent offices so a little stealth may be required.