Letterboxing

You're not alone there nqapali, and yes with a commercial twist we could have Bazza employed but he would be wanting his Plumbers $70/h rate.

Thankyou all for your interest!
To clarify: letterboxing did indeed start in England in the nineteenth century at Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor.
The activity only began to proliferate in the 1970's and until quite recently was confined to Dartmoor, although a few boxes were sited on the Falkland Islands.
Letterboxing in North America started when a couple from Connecticut went on holiday to England and spent the entire time combing the moor for boxes. There are now letterboxes scattered all over the world.
No, you don't use a GPS. You locate the boxes using your brains, a compass and a map. Many clues are based on triangular bearings, but many others are cryptic and require detailed knowledge of the area.
In England boxes are not sited near roads and rarely near trails. The original Cranmere box is 7 miles from the nearest road and reaching it involves a lot of climbing, bashing through heather and bog hopping.
And yes, most of my boxes were collected on mountain sides or tops.

Boxing is great fun and highly addictive. It's something that appeals to people of all ages. It's something families can enjoy together. It's a great way to get exercise. You get to visit areas of outstanding natural beauty where you may otherwise never dream of going. It can also be extremely frustrating......

There is a web site for New Zealand. I just posted my question in the vague hope that there might be a letterboxer among you Thorntrees.
Google letterboxing+New Zealand.

I wish I'd seen this thread earlier - it would have been far more interesting than the day I've had...

Um, not sure how far from Dartmoor it's travelled - certainly hasn't made it to Yorkshire. Coming from a mining village as I do, if someone at school had mentioned letterboxing as a hobby they wouldn't have even got to the stage of describing it. It also has some strange sexual connotation - or is that just me??!?

I guess it's just another name for orienteering, with a twist. Well done for making the top thread though.

I don't reckon it'd work too well in Oz. Few reasons.

1. There are no 'rights of way', so you can't walk across farmland....walking is pretty much done on tracks, even if some of them are quite remote.
2. You can't drop plastic boxes in National Parks and expect them to stay there.
3. Families aren't going to be 'bush bashing' - Australian bush is pretty dense and the National Parks don't generally have farms and settlements in them like Dartmoor does (UK Nat Pks are very different beasts to Australian)
4. Vandalism would see most of them disappear.

However, bog roll collection does have a certain je ne sais quo about it....but Drover more often than not in the more remote muck huts its BYO gum leaf, or cafe serviette, no?

PS Say "letterboxing' to an Aussie and they'll think you have a paid job stuffing junk mail in people's letter boxes, or an enthusiastic political partisan during election time.

Yes, I had been wondering on the vandalism impact and so
# Aphrodite - is that a big issue with letterboxing in the UK or USA that you know of.

#23 ryb - there is a lot of farmland that does have ROWs, not all fenced off though and then you have the long paddock in more remote places and plenty of state forests with trails.
So we would have limitations but there is always ingenuity.

Not very appealing prospect to me; has more of the sense of a 1960s style "car tial" than a ramble across gentle countryside. Or even bog-hopping on Dartmoor (different bogs, Drover)
Most farmland in Australia is fenced and gated. And you don't hop across styles and tromp across neatly ploughed fields (carfully avoiding actual crops) without thoughts of encountering Farmer Bruce with a shoddie.
Where the hell are the farmland Rights of Way in farming Australia, pray tell?

I must disagree with ryb(23) -
- so long as you are discreet you can wander over many farms here, especially if the paddocks are several square ks and the farmhouse is 10km away! (besides there are lots of out of the way places in forests, roadsides etc to drop letterboxes)
- so long as a letterbox is well hidden (as the ones overseas are) I'd bet it would stay indefinitely in any NP or state forest (until the next bushfire, anyway)
- 'bushbashing' - every week hundreds of people all over Australia go orienteering and rogaining in bush areas in every state..
-'vandalism' - do we have more than Europe or the US? they don't seem to have a problem. A letterbox is a pretty insignificant feature...

It's a 'sport' that seems to be ideal for Australia IMO - I can't believe it hasn't taken off more (would be ideal on a mountain bike..)

ROW register re national parks - first link checked and <blockquote>Quote
<hr>there is a lot of farmland that does have ROWs, not all fenced off though <hr></blockquote> though they are not all physically delineated, lands departments and councils will have similar registrations/info to that in the national parks link.

<blockquote>Quote
<hr>so long as you are discreet you can wander over many farms here<hr></blockquote> Fences are not only for keeping livestock in but also for keeping the public out. Cockies take a dim view of trespassers disturbing both their cows and canola.