Chapter 1: Eccentric Trig Bagging

I had a mate who would occasionally post random pictures on my social media feed, with captions I can only describe as “textbook enigmatic”.  It was like he wanted me to work out for myself where he was or what he was up to, and find out interesting minutiae along the way.  I’ve always enjoyed puzzles, and there’s not a lot you can’t find out with a few well-chosen keywords on Google.  Indeed, said mate had unwittingly sent me down a number of Internet rabbit-holes with some of the things he’d previously posted.  I wanted to reply like I knew what was going on all along, without actually giving the game away – as if I was a member of a secret club, conversing in a way no-one else could understand.  The best example of this was a thing he posted in August 2018: it was a zoomed in picture of a simple metal plate with a symbol in the middle and some letters and numbers, and he accompanied it with the caption “Wish you were here?”.  Because I’m a curious guy, I needed to know where he was, so I Googled “metal plate” and “wall plate” and the like, until it eventually struck me that I should probably search for the letters and numbers instead.  “OSBM 2987”.  And that worked – I found a picture of the same plate in Google Images, along with a wider picture of the structure it was attached to.  And as luck would have it, I recognised it – it was somewhere I had been, quite randomly, a few years before.  So I made my response, saying I loved the view from where he was at, and just left it there with no further explanation.  Job done, move on.  Only I didn’t move on.

I’ll save you the trouble of Googling:  OSBM stands for Ordnance Survey Bench Mark; the metal plates are called Flush Brackets (they are brackets on which one can mount a theodolite, and they are flush with the surface they’re attached to, in contrast with the Projecting Brackets they replaced); and 2987 is the unique identifier which specifies this particular bracket’s location.  Flush Brackets were used by the Ordnance Survey in various re-mapping exercises and retriangulations throughout the bulk of the twentieth century; many are attached to prominent buildings, but you might also find them on bridges, walls, posts, or occasionally big rocks.  There are several thousand of them hidden all around the UK, including over six thousand which are attached to Triangulation Pillars.  These odd little obelisks are generally found on hilltops, because they were constructed to provide a solid structure of known height, within sight of each other, from which specialist equipment can measure the angles and distances between them.  And then, with some clever maths involving triangles, the surveyors can comprehensively map the landscape of the UK with remarkable accuracy.  Readers living near Oxfordshire can find 2987 on a pillar at the site of Uffington Castle atop White Horse Hill – the highest point in that county – which has a view that attracts plenty of tourists.  Having learned that much, I really should move on, now.  But I didn’t.

I grew up in the pretty (if unexciting) village of Goring-on-Thames in the shadow of Streatley Hill, and I’d been up the hill on many occasions ever since childhood.  On a clear day, you could see all the way from the chimneys at Didcot to the water tower at Tilehurst (and more recently, to the windmill at Junction 11 of the M4, south of Reading).  It was a great place to go for a walk or a picnic, and although we usually stayed on the southern side of the fence (Lardon Chase rather than Lough Down), we did sometimes cross the stile into the opposite field, though until now, I’d never really thought much about the strange concrete pillar on the north side of the stile.  Over six thousand…  so how come I’ve only seen two?  Are there any others in this neck of the woods, I wonder?

Oh, yes.  Yes with bells on.

My wife was fairly unenthused when I told her what I’d found out that day.  Strange though it may sound, it seems some folks just aren’t fascinated by long-abandoned concrete slabs.  I thought it might be fun to troll my mate by posting a handful of selfies with pillars in the background, though, so I set about visiting some of them over the next few days, usually on my way back from work.  Don’t worry, I told my missus – this is not going to become A Thing.  Words I have said before, and meant every time, and which have proved to be spectacularly inaccurate on almost every occasion.  S5727 was in a layby outside Compton village between my work and my home.  A little further along the same route, S5545 is perched on a roadside embankment opposite the entrance to Douai Abbey.  The following day I found S6167 in a pretty little wood near Cold Ash, and then on that weekend I returned to my childhood home to revisit S5726 at Lough Down, stopping off en route for S6185 near Mapledurham, and taking in S5731 which is off the beaten track, on a hill in South Stoke.  When I had nine in total, I put something up on my socials, and then, as promised, I stopped.  This is not A Thing; it ends here.  I moved on, and that was that.

Fast forward to late December.  My wife and I were making our way to Lincolnshire – a not inconsiderable drive from our home in Reading – and I’d been looking at our route on Streetmap when I noticed a couple of blue triangular symbols I’d never previously paid attention to.  Although it’s quite rare for me to do it, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to pull into a layby after a couple of hours’ driving, just to stretch my legs for five minutes and wake myself up a bit.  It was all right for my missus – she’d dozed off in the passenger seat – but as the driver, it would be rather frowned upon if I were to have forty winks behind the wheel.  So I pulled off the main road shortly after leaving the M1, and drove through Farcet, which had a very handy place to pull in, right on the edge of the village.  She woke up just as I stopped.

“Are you OK?” 
“Yeah, just need to take a break for five minutes, and then we’ll get going again – is that all right?” 
“Yes, of course.” 
“I won’t be long – I’m just going to wander to that trig pillar and back, and then we’ll be off.” 
“I THOUGHT YOU SAID THAT WASN’T A THING!” 
“It isn’t.  But it seemed silly to drive past it and not take a selfie.”
“Hang on, where are we anyway?”
“It’s only a little diversion – we’ll be back on the main road in a minute.”

 And to be fair, it was and we were.

“There aren’t any others on the way, are there?”
“Ummm… there might be one beside the A16 after we leave Dalby.  No diversions required.”
“OK, but no more, please.”
“Don’t worry – it’s not A Thing.”

 But because there were two on that trip, my total was now eleven, and that would be a very unsatisfying number to finish on… 

 I was actually quite surprised how many pillars lurked around the area I grew up in.  I knew the village of Woodcote well, having gone to school there, but I had no idea there was a pillar on Greenmoor Hill.  To be fair, S6168 is so well hidden in the undergrowth, I could probably have lived next door to it and never known it was there!   Initially, I just had Streetmaps to look for them, which told me where they were, but not whether they still existed or whether they were actually accessible.  There was a lot of trial and error involved back then, and I swiftly became intimately acquainted with brambles (S4667 Down Hill, near Didcot) and hedges (Farleigh Wallop, with the pleasing Bracket number of S5555) and nettles (S6088 Dunsden).  But I figured if I couldn’t handle the vegetation at its worst, I didn’t deserve the hilltop views at their best, and I’d also enjoyed a couple of wonderful views by now (S1682 Beacon Camp off the Newbury Bypass; and S5724 Lowbury Hill near Aldworth, to name but two).  And my trig bagging radius was swiftly expanded when I started including them in my occasional trips to London to see bands (such as S3940 Horsenden Hill in Perivale – a fantastic view from that one, but a slippery one underfoot in February with snow on the ground).

Inevitably, throughout 2019, trig bagging became more and more of A Thing.  I discovered the Trigpointing UK website, which swiftly became an essential resource, as it has a separate page for every pillar (even those which have long since been destroyed) containing their bracket numbers, links to maps, proximity from other nearby pillars, and (most interestingly) logs and photos from other trigpointers as they visit each pillar.  Suddenly, I had a very good way of determining where I should go next and what I should expect to find when I got there.  A quick selfie at each pillar soon became a set of carefully taken photos, as I made sure I included multiple shots of the pillar, with close-ups of the bracket and top, so I could contribute to the site myself.  An interest group on Facebook also crossed my radar, too, which led to some initial bemusement from an audience of mostly ramblers who were surprised to see someone stood by all these trigs wearing a shirt and tie.  As the number of pillars I could reach on my commute home dwindled, though, so the pictures of The Eccentric Trig Bagger in a suit dried up, to be replaced by pictures of the guy in the Coca-Cola Hat.  This is a peaked cap made primarily from used Coke tins, which I bought at Wallingford Bunkfest in 2018, and wore a few days later when I visited S5729 in North Stoke.  A friend asked if I’d got myself a dedicated trigpointing hat, which I swiftly denied because trigpointing was still Not A Thing at that stage.  As my bagging activities became more organised and consisted of dedicated roadtrips rather than spur-of-the-moment drive-bys, I remembered his comment and started wearing it deliberately.  Never believe anything about me until I’ve emphatically denied it!

And then came the spreadsheet.  It was all very well adding logs to Trigpointing UK, but being a spreadsheet geek, I had to compile my own document to list the names, dates, and bracket numbers of all my bags, plus a score for the view, another for the difficulty, and a small commentary.  At which point I noticed that I’d found quite a few pillars with consecutively numbered brackets, which looked very satisfying when I sorted the spreadsheet by bracket number.  In fact, I’d quickly bagged an unbroken run of eight bracket numbers (“consecutrigs” if you like), which gave me a target to aim for.  This run was all around my home turf, somewhere between Goring-on-Thames and Wantage, and ran from S5724 through S5731 inclusive.  Another website dedicated to OS benchmarks gave me a list of all the pillars in numerical order, which in turn enabled me to plan trips that might extend any sequences I started to bag, and I was keen to either extend my current run, or get a longer one.

It's not the pillars themselves that I find fascinating, although their history, usefulness, and effectiveness certainly makes for an interesting story (which I’ll let other people tell).  It’s that looking for them is like going on a treasure hunt (sadly, minus the treasure, but the quest is the quest) – bagging trig points means there are adventures out there to be had.  One person online described it as “orienteering with attitude”.  Some of these adventures will involve all sorts of horribleness, from brambles and nettles to muddy puddles and charging cattle.  Far more of them, though, involve the beautiful English countryside at its most glorious – the opportunity to view God’s work at its finest, and get away from the troubles of the world for a short while.  There are paths to be walked that I’d otherwise never discover, and hills to be climbed that I’d certainly never have bothered with beforehand (I am not exactly a paragon of fitness and health), and I’m sure the exercise is doing me good (even though the backs of my legs are protesting while I type).  My knowledge of the infrastructure of the south of England is rapidly improving, as I drive further afield to new places in search of un-bagged concrete.  And at the end of the day, I get to update a spreadsheet, add my knowledge to a website, and share my photos with a like-minded community.  However ridiculous it sounds to have a hobby which ultimately amounts to looking at very similar bits of concrete, for the experiences I’ve had along the way, it’s genuinely fun and interesting, with lots of beautiful sights to see.  It’s ultimately a very rewarding way to spend a day every few weeks.  Did I say there was no treasure?  The sight of the golden sunrise on a clear day from the top of the Malvern hills is a fabulous prize that can only be earned and not bought, and can never be taken from me.

I’d started to roam around the countryside with the specific intention of bagging three or four trigs at a time, but as 2020 dawned, Covid-19 put paid to my wanderings for a few months, and a final be-suited trip to the very unsuited location of S5824 Beedon Hill on the evening the lockdown was announced would be the last regular sighting of the Eccentric Trig Bagger.  I used the break to get properly organised…

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Whilst I’m preparing myself, here’s a few of the more notable bags from my Jurassic Era:

S1268 Liddington Castle was the centre of a trip I made in May 2019.  I carried a towel with me because it was National Towel Day, and it appears in the selfies I took at all four trigs I bagged that afternoon.  There isn’t a fat lot of parking available for this location, despite its size, prominence, and location on The Ridgeway, which meant about a mile’s walk, taking me through a very colourful flowering meadow populated by hundreds of butterflies.  The pillar itself sits beside a toposcope on the ramparts of the hillfort, and can be seen a considerable distance away.  At the time of my visit, a wooden platform had been erected around both monuments; I understand this structure has since been considered hazardous, and taped off.  An exceptional view in every direction is marred by the inclusion of Swindon to the north, and the location was being used by a number of paragliders on the day.  On occasion, I will stay at a location to just sit and enjoy the scenery, and Liddington Castle was, I think, the first pillar I visited where I did exactly that.  A nearby copse behind a bunker is used as a burial and/or memorial site for a large number of beloved pets, and there were tributes hanging from the branches.  A very memorable little walk, all told, and one I’d be happy to repeat some day, as the trek to the hillfort was on a very gentle incline indeed.  The pillar is also notable for its extremely low bracket number – in fact it’s the only trig pillar to carry a number below 1400.

S1701 Stoke Village was an after-work detour in August 2019.  It’s located on a farm, and the footpath to it leads past various farm animals in their pens and cages, before two lines of small standing stones mark out a wide path across a grassy field that culminates in the trigpoint, sitting proud at the centre of a stone circle.  I love that the landowners have turned their trig into a feature and made it easy for people to find – far too often they do the opposite and bury them in hedges, or remove them completely.  The Stoke pillar doesn’t enjoy much of a view, but it is in particularly excellent condition, and ranks among the most pampered pillars I’ve had the good fortune to visit.

S3374 Ilchester Crescent was my first Bristol trig.  I often found myself in Bristol in pursuit of live music, so I was delighted to find a few blue triangles in the city when I looked on Streetmaps.  With Bristol being fairly hilly, I naively thought they might all be in parks or public gardens on various hilltops and summits; that they’d be easy to walk to; and that they’d offer me some fine views of one of my favourite cities.  More fool me.  One is among the nettles in the corner of a private allotment, with its flush bracket flush to a fence.  Another overlooks Temple Meads station, but a housing development has sealed it off behind a back garden, and reaching it now requires obtaining a homeowner’s permission to scale their wooden fence, then scaling the chain link fence behind it, and then crashing around in head-high brambles whilst trying not to fall off a cliff onto the railway track below.  Let me think about that…  Computer Says No.  Ilchester Crescent is an absolute joy by comparison – a short train journey from Temple Meads to Parson’s Green and a five minute walk around the corner brought me to a grotty and run down housing estate, where a very damaged trig coated in bird poo was sinking into the litter-strewn grassy verge almost out of shame.  Despite having an hour to kill before the next train back to Temple Meads, I was very keen to leave this one quickly, not least because my selfie-taking had attracted the attention of a drunken vagrant sprawled under a nearby bush.  I love Bristol for very many reasons, but trigpointing is not one of them! 

S3701 Ditchling Beacon was bagged en route to a gig in Brighton on Valentine’s Day 2020.  This appears to be a pillar with a blossoming love life, as an admirer had presented it with a white rose prior to my visit.

S4033 Devil’s Dyke was bagged en route to a different Brighton gig, in May 2019.  This location is a famed tourist attraction, with plenty of parking and a large selection of hill furniture to look at should you find an expansive view from Berkshire to the Isle Of Wight insufficiently impressive.  I had to duck a few times to avoid the paragliders coming in to land, and after a few near misses, took myself off to the pub beside the car park, which served me with an excellent roast dinner.  I’ve since seen this pillar show up at the end of a mate’s music video – it’s a very popular trig and with good reason.

A far less popular one is S5559 Blackbushe, successfully bagged at the second attempt, on New Year’s Day 2020.  This one is hidden behind some roadside gorse bushes outside Blackbushe Aerodrome, and it’s an absolute bugger.  There’s a small parking place beside a roundabout about half a mile up the A30, from which I then walked back towards the trig, not knowing its exact location but not being able to peer through the bushes to find it, as the narrow, slippery, and very uneven verge required my full concentration to walk down, even during the few brief moments without a stream of vehicles speeding down the road towards me.  After searching behind a few bushes, I eventually found the right one and bagged this most unrewarding of pillars, but for each bush I investigated, I had to scramble across a large waterlogged irrigation ditch, lined with rotten trees that swayed and cracked alarmingly if I so much as farted near them, never mind held on to them for support.   One day I might revisit some of the pillars I’ve found, but it’ll be a cold day in Hell before I revisit the Blackbushe one!

S5965 Anderby Creek (bagged April 2019) isn’t especially spectacular (despite being very near a beach), but nor is it especially unsavoury (despite being located right outside the entrance to a public lavatory).  I include it as an example of Sod’s Law, as it was dusk when I reached it and the flash on my camera failed when I took my selfies.  At the time, the picture quality looked acceptable, but when I uploaded it to my PC back home, I discovered it really wasn’t, and I now find myself in need of an excuse to return there and take a better one.  And the ol’ Law of Sod dictates that it’s one of the furthest trigs from my home that I’ve bagged (slightly beaten by a couple on the far end of the Gower Peninsula), not helped by the route being a succession of featureless identikit A-roads once you leave the motorways halfway there (whereas Gower is straight down the M4).

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Right then, let's do this properly...