Seeing as we have a National Trust membership again, we decided to look at NT places to visit this weekend. After a quick search, we decided on Arlington Court as it’s dog friendly, has lots of lovely walks around the estate, and has lots of geocaches too!

Arlington Court is a National Trust Estate in North Devon, close to Exmoor. We arrived there yesterday around 2pm. As we were arriving, we saw signs about a Christmas market happening this weekend on the estate. Something we didn’t know about. We soon saw how busy it was going to be, when we saw how full the car park was!

We decided to have a quick look around the Christmas market, even though Jo exclaimed; ‘It’s too early for Christmas: I’ve not had my birthday yet!’ The market stalls were actually pretty good, better than I expected, as they had quite a lot of unique and handmade gifts and decorations, not like the usual Christmas markets you’ll find dotted around towns and cities. After looking around the stalls, we decided to give in to the smell of the BBQ and have our last BBQ burger of the year, along with my first mulled wine of the year!

Once we had filled our bellies, we pressed on to follow a circular woodland walk that surrounds the estate which was mapped out through our geocaching app. For those of you that want to know more about geocaching, it really is worth checking out their website geocaching.com. It’s great fun for children and adults, and it’s made us discover places we didn’t know existed! We even bumped into a geocacher doing his first ever cache with his young son, who beat us to the geocache we wanted to find! We ended up having a quick chat with him about the caches we’ve done, and gave out some tips on some of the place we’ve discovered fun geocaches his son will probably enjoy. The geocaches we did on this walk were linked to National Trust and took us through woodland, farmland and along the river. We walked about 6 miles in total.

It wasn’t long before we had quite a few caches found, this route had some really great cache containers, including the ammo case above. Geocaching is great for kids that love swapping bits and bobs, it’s like a real life treasure hunt. I’ve found over 500 caches over the years! It’s also free to do, and doesn’t require using your data whilst out and about.

We first walked past a beautiful lake and church by the Arlington Estate, this lead us into some woodland that ran along side a river. Throughout most of the walk, we followed the river around, crossing over a few old stone bridges along the way. This walk was quite steep and strenuous in places, and wasn’t wheelchair/buggy friendly. But of course there are plenty of other walks around the estate to enjoy, that are suitable for everyone. There are maps and leaflets in the National Trust entrance/shop to check out the walks you can do. All these walks are clearly marked out along the routes by public footpath signage. So it would be hard to get lost!

We didn’t manage to find all the geocaches on this route, as the sun was starting to set, so we tried to press on and do the ones we could find quickly, but not stop to search for too long. By the time we had arrived back at the car park, it was rather dark, and the car park was no longer busy, with only a couple of cars still parked in it. We will probably come back and visit again soon, I’d love to see the house and the carriage museum. There seems to be so many beautiful walks surrounding this estate, and a lot of history about the estate I need to read up on. This walk really was lovely in Autumn, crunching through the fallen leaves, and walking alongside the flowing rivers and little waterfalls. Well worth a visit, and maybe try geocaching whilst you’re there?