Concrete is Fun and Interesting... Honest!

July 2026.   Since Covid, I’ve been on 59 dedicated trigspeditions, the vast majority of which have been memorable for very good reasons.   So I asked myself, where can I go that would make my 60 th roadtrip stand proud among the best of them?   My favourite memory so far is reaching the Worcestershire Beacon in time to see the sun creep over the horizon…   so let’s do something like that again!   I don’t think I’ve ever driven on five different consecutive motorways before; nor have I ever visited the fair county of Shropshire.   The Wrekin is not a difficult location to drive to, being a short distance from the end of the M54, and if you’re lucky (or early) enough, there’s free parking to be had along the road beneath the hill.   Now I know where I want to go, can I find another dozen or so pillars in the vicinity that would make this a worthwhile trip?   I screengrabbed a map of the area and looked up each blue triangle in turn on Trigpointing...

On 3rd January 2021, a 13 year old autistic boy, Olly Stephens, was stabbed to death in a field in Reading.   In late 2025, his parents set up a charitable trust in his name, and shortly afterwards my wife and her friends were involved in a concert to raise awareness and funding for them.   The event was a great success, and my wife was given a small token – a painted pebble – which contained a link to the trust’s social media site.   Knowing that I’ve come across painted pebbles on pillars before, she asked me to take it with me on my next trip and leave it somewhere suitable, where it might be found and passed on... April 2026.   Cannock Chase is a large area of forest on the wrong side of Birmingham which seemed to be home to some particularly spectacular concrete infestations, and the more I looked into mounting a trigspedition there, the more impatient I became to get back out on the road again.   In particular, a very long road called the M40, which made f...

Occasionally on my roadtrips, if I’d found myself somewhere particularly iconic or scenic at an ungodly hour of the morning, I’d put one of my selfies up on Facebook and invite my Friends List to guess where I was.  This amused one of my mates, and down the pub one evening she asked me when I was going to post the next one.  I was noncommittal, knowing that I had a trigspedition planned for the very next day, and less than twelve hours later I duly obliged with a selfie on the verdant bank of a large river which reflected the early morning November sun in its waters, and I invited my Facebook friends to play “Where’s The Wally?”.  I made sure to include a particularly famous bridge in the background, which if spotted, would give away my location beside the mighty River Severn.  The pillar itself - S3282 (apparently) Caldicot Moor - did not appear in my selfie because it’s been embedded in the coastal defences and is buried literally to within an inch.  If you we...

October, and back on the road again; this time the road in question is a quiet little country lane called the M25, which led me to Epping Forest, from where I struck out north, only to find myself bewildered and disappointed by some of the trigs I found. S4750 Monkhams Hall and S4474 Bromley Common both fall into the bewildering category, for similar reasons – both are accessible via lengthy driveways which are clearly signed as Private, and in the latter case, watched over by CCTV.  Ordinarily, I would apply Rule One here and either find an alternative route or move on to the next one…  but the same driveways were also clearly signed as PROWs just a few metres away.  Confused by the contradictions, I strode purposefully up the tracks regardless.  I was spotted at both locations, but nobody paid me any interest, so I’m assuming that the Footpath and Bridleway signs at these locations take preference – for pedestrians, at least.  The latter trig is sited beside t...