Search is on for Shropshire's hidden cache treasures

These people are geocachers. What they actually have in their hands are GPS receivers. And what they are doing is taking part in a modern-day treasure hunt.

Most of us will have done treasure-hunts as children, deciphering riddles to lead us to the next clue. But in the digital age the riddle will lead not to a place, but to co-ordinates to be entered into the GPS.

For the uninitiated, a geocache can be pretty much anything. There are the traditional boxes, which will be maked "Official Geocache", but the more imaginitive will use things like garden ornaments to make finding the prize just that little bit harder.

In its simplest form, a cache always contains a logbook or logsheet for an individual to log their find. Larger caches may contain a logbook and any number of items left there by the person who has hidden it.

Geocaching has taken off in a big way, and this year the West Midlands hosted the UK's sixth "mega-event" – the annual get-together for enthusiasts from around the world.

The event, at the Heritage Motor Centre in Gaydon, Warwickshire, attracted more than 1,500 people over eight days in July and August and resulted in nearly £2,000 being donated to various good causes including Midlands Air Ambulance, Birmingham Children's Hospital and Children in Need.

One of those who attended the mega-event was Roland Leath, 58, from Shawbury, who goes by the geocache name BFG.

Roland is highly active in the West Midlands geocaching community. His family team have been responsible for placing more than 1,000 geocaches around the Shropshire area with Roland himself responsible for more than 300 including on the South Telford Heritage Trail and at Attingham Park near Shrewsbury.

Roland says geocaching is a great way to explore the outdoors. "The great thing about geocaching is it gets people outside, especially families with children," he said.

"If you have youngsters who don't like walking, but tell them you are going on a treasure hunt it adds a whole new aspect to it and suddenly they're off. They'll walk five or six miles and not even realise it.

"It takes you to places you might not normally go to and don't realise exist. On the Heritage Trail one of the caches is on an old bridge in the wood and there is a brick structure there. People are finding it who have lived a few hundred metres away and say they didn't know it was there. Madeley has a windmill in the woods which a lot of people don't know about."

But it is not just about rambling around the countryside. There are dozens of caches hidden, for example, around Birmingham city centre. There are also "drive-bys" which need the use of a car to get from cache to cache.

The caches can be as simple as a box with items inside, but the more creative cachers will convert things like golf balls and garden ornaments into finds.

The hobby doesn't have to cost the earth.

"It isn't that expensive," Roland says. A GPS device can cost £100 to £600 but you can also get an app for your smart phone and a lot of people just do it that way. They are reasonably accurate."

But there is much more to geocaching than just finding the co-ordinates on a GPS device. There are puzzles to be solved and some events are even themed.

Just last month geocachers met up at the Wheelbarrow Castle Pub in Worcester for an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.

Roland said: "It is certainly booming and people are coming up with different ideas all the time. I have got a series of puzzle-caches based on calendars where you have to work out the co-ordinates from the picture on the cache. Nobody has solved any of those yet. There is a sudoku series around Ellesmere where each puzzle gives the co-orindates for the next one."

Caches are given a rating based on the terrain in which they are hidden, and how difficult they are to find. This has led to a sub-section of the hobby known as "extreme caching".

"The hardest rating is 5:5 and there are some people who only do these," said Roland.

The Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre, near Craven Arms has a number of geocache routes which start at the tourist attraction.

Discovery Centre assistant Chris Evans said: "It's very popular. We get people coming back to do it again once they have done it once. They tell us it is very addictive.

"People will come to do one and then return and very often keep coming back until they have done all of them.

"In a week over the summer we can get five or six groups a day. Obviously we only have a limited number of GPS devices to hire out.

It is more popular in the summer, but is a year-round activity and doing it in the autumn or winter presents different challenges.

"People who have never heard of geocaching can come here and do it and then discover more routes. There are a lot of routes in Shropshire. I suppose it's the ideal landscape for it."

• A special Shropshire Star-themed geocache will be hidden somewhere in the region very soon. For details visit www.geocaching.com

By David Burrows