As a land manager, with professional interest in GPS, I have followed the development of Geocaching in this country over the past few months, and have begun to liaise with some members of the geocaching community.
There are lots of positive benfits to the activity, and the very fact that people are encouraged to explore countryside in a non-invasive manner has found support with my bosses.
It is very important for me and my colleagues to know what is happening on our sites, and that requires an acceptance of guidelines that we are currently developing. Other landowners will potentially follow if we can show that this approach works, and the caching potential for you is enormous, given mutual trust.
That trust can only be achieved through an organisation that formally adopts the guidelines and has a membership structure that ensures that guidelines are adopted by individuals who place caches.
In the absence of such an agreement, it is likely that cache placement will not find favour with landowners, and they are likely to reject requests to place caches, or actively find caches and remove them.
Geocaching is a great new activity, making wide use of access to the countryside, but there is no right to place caches in this country, and so I would implore you to make the best of forming an organisation, and using that formal mechansim to develop a strong relationship with landowners and their agents.
