I’ve spent the day geocaching. In the rain, and despite the boggy weather made two good finds.

The idea is simple: people hide a cache - usually something in a plastic box, containing a little bit of treasure and a log - then put a starting coordinate and a clue on the web. You punch the coordinate into your GPS device, pull on your dustiest hiking boots and a fleece, and head out to dig it up. Once you’ve found it, you sign the log, take something out of the cache, replace it with something of your own and then put it all back where you found it.

It’s a modern day treasure hunt.

So, despite the weather, I downloaded two this morning and, after lunch, headed out with Glenda the talking GPS woman, to find them. She took me through Billericay first, and out into the countryside towards Basildon, eventually demanding that I stop beside a very pretty church with a picturesque graveyard in the middle of pretty much nowhere.

It was actually a very easy find, this one. Once you’d walked past the graves and out through a gap in the hedge at the back, there was a long ditch, crumbling slightly where the tree roots were eating away at the ground. My eye was caught by a wooden cross that had obviously fallen from one of the graves, and I assumed that it had been strategically positioned to point at the cache, but despite a bit of ginger digging it appeared to be a red herring. As I stepped backwards, back across the ditch, though, I spotted a small pile of twigs among the roots and, beneath them, a snatch of blue. It was a plastic box containing the cache.

Picking it out, I opened it up and looked through the contents, which were impressively multinational. This had clearly been visited by people from the far east as it contained Hong Kong dollars. and a small set of Chinese worry beads, which I took, and replaced with a half-full loyalty card from Virgin, which will give someone a head start on a free CD if they buy two more.

The next cache on my list was about 10km south. When you start looking for these things, it’s amazing how many there are. If you do a search for caches within 20 miles of my postcode, it turns up 202 results.

Anyhow, this next one was much more difficult. It was in the Lion’s Gorge, which is a big chalk pit with 100ft high walls and steep banks. I got infuriatingly close on my first attempt, but it was obvious I needed to be at the top of one of those walls, rather than the bottom. I looked up, but couldn’t see anything, despite the GPS map showing I was practically on top of it. Little did I know at the time it was practically on top of me.

I eventually found a little steep path and scrambled up to the top where I could look back down into the gorge. By now it was raining, but I spent 15 minutes hunting for the treasure, which was small and, the clue told me, held in place by magnets. It obviously had to be stuck to something metal, so I clambered around the fencing, but couldn’t see it.

By the time the rain was coming through my coat I decided to look for some shelter, so headed half way back down the hill and stood under a tree, studying my map. On looking up, though, I noticed that the bung on the top of one of the fence posts wasn’t properly seated.

I went over and lifted it up, and inside…

…a small zip-lock bag containing some paper, a pen and four magnets, which held it to the inside of the post. A really devious, but quite excellent hiding place. Nobody could have found it by chance, and yet looking at the signatures on the log I was the second person to have been there today; someone else had dug it up (and obviously left the top a little loose) just two hours before.

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