Today was the last day of this Easter’s Adventure + holiday club program at Ellesmere College. Normally it runs over 5 days but, with tomorrow being Good Friday and a bank holiday, we’er a day short of usual.

This morning I took them to Nesscliffe Hill Country Park where there is a permanent orienteering course which has been laid out. I have done a basic orienteering session with the Adventure + crew before (that time at Llanymynech), so wanted to add a bit of a twist this time by turning it into an orienteering treasure hunt.

It took a bit of working out last night but I got there in the end. Basically, at each point they correctly located, they found a letter. Having found all the points, and the corresponding letters, they were left with an anagram which would lead then to the treasure.

Of the three groups giving it a go, we had three very different outcomes. One group found all the points remarkably quickly, but took ages to solve the anagram. One group managed to find all but one of the points by the time we had to leave. The third and final group seemed to spend most of their time walking around ‘geographically challenged’! At the end of the day, it was a beautiful morning and everyone enjoyed the outing no matter how good their map reading was.