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Another month, another Treasure Trail. A day out for Callum to break up his A Level revision.
This time we headed to Guildford. We found the recommended car park fairly easily, although the spaces weren’t that deep. Jon was incredibly brave and asked Callum to guide him in to ensure he was in as far as possible … avoiding the pillar in the corner of the parking space. You couldn’t have got a cigarette’s paper between the car bumper and the wall, and around 1cm between car and pillar! Jon was pretty shocked at just how close Callum had got him!
I have vague recollections of visiting Guildford previously both with Jon and before that with my parents, but nothing looked even vaguely familiar when we got there.
The Guildford Town and Castle Treasure Trail starts at the heart of the town centre on the main shopping street before heading through a cemetery. The churchyard was full of your traditional headstones, most of which had been weathered so you could no longer read the inscriptions. There was one headstone that stood out – the Warrior Angel – a tribute created by the deceased mans sister in his memory.
There were lots of little lanes with shops tucked away. We navigated the clues and the trail took us a long the river, to the war memorial and into the Castle Grounds (Guildford had a castle – who knew!)
There was a bowling club established right by the war memorial – close to here was a little garden tucked away (you wouldn’t know it was here) with a statue of Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll visited his six sisters who lived in Guildford very regularly but never actually lived here himself. The statue was pretty special.
The final clues were at the Castle we’d seen glimpses of the castle on the later part of the trail but you got up close to the base of the tower at the end.
Some of the clues were a little harder than the usual and some took a little more searching for. We did enjoy the trail, especially the latter stages with the Alice statue, War Memorial area and Castle Grounds. It would be lovely in a month or so once all the flowers are out.
We headed back to the car park and decided to eat at the Thai Terrace – the thai restaurant by the car park. We hadn’t really looked inside when we past, but found the downstairs was just a lobby and you needed to get the lift to the seventh floor to reach the restaurant. It was huge upstairs. The weather wasn’t nice enough to sit outside (views over the city, from where we were sat, it wasn’t the picturesque side). We just had main course each and all the food was lovely – one of the nicest thai meals we’ve had in a while.
