Open Country

The sport of geocaching has become increasingly popular. The modern twist on a treasure hunt involves using GPS to solve clues and follow trails to find caches and the rise of the smartphone has seen its popularity soar. Helen Mark joins hundreds of geocachers in the Salcey Forest in Northamptonshire where people have travelled from across the world to be at the 'mega-event'. The ancient hunting forest was used by Henry VIII but also once saw elephants roam the land. Will the clues help her find out more about its history?Produced in Bristol by Anne-Marie Bullock.

Helen Mark rides a mile and quarter of old railway line that the local people of Mountsorrel in Leicestershire have been restoring over the past six years. It was Steve Cramp who was out walking one weekend that first noticed the over grown and disused railway - he then had a crazy idea to restore the track to it's former glory. Built in 1860 it was used to carry granite and stones from the quarry. Helen spends a day on the railway track and discovers how the project has benefited some volunteers coping with illness and bereavement and even meets a volunteer who comes from Paris to help carry out work on the track.Producer : Perminder Khatkar .

Once strewn with apple, pear and plum orchards the Vale of Evesham has been famous for its fruit since the middle ages. Helen Mark visits the Vale to see the work being done to continue the area's heritage of fruit production.In Pershore she spends the day at the annual plum festival, a celebration of the close association the town has had with the fruit for hundreds of years. Here, she meets comedian and conservationist, Alistair McGowan, and hears about his memories of growing up in the area and lifelong fondness for plums.After the boom years of fruit production in the Vale at the end of the nineteenth century, the 1950s saw a decline in the industry and, since then, almost 80% of the orchards have closed in the area. Helen meets Edward Crowther, whose family has run fruit businesses near Evesham for many generations, and hears about the changes in the Vale during the last century. She joins John Porter at Hipton Hill orchard and learns about the work his conservation group is doing to arrest the decline in the number of traditional orchards in the area and restore them to their former glory.Produced by Beatrice Fenton.

Helen Mark explores the newly safeguarded 'Laurie Lee Wood' and meets the people who inhabit the 21st Century 'Cider with Rosie' Landscape. Earlier this year Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust had an unprecedented response to its appeal to save a plot of ancient woodland. It had once belonged to Slad Valley's beloved son, Laurie Lee. Having become too much for the author and playwright's remaining family to maintain, the trust launched an appeal to take it over. In this week's Open Country Helen Mark meets the people who saved this land and the community that still find inspiration in this valley today including Julie and Simon Cooper at 'The Cider Farm' where they now handcraft frames for old master paintings, artist Amanda Lawrence who draws inspiration from the natural landscape and captures her work in glass and writer Adam Horovitz who is capturing his own 'Cider with Rosie' experience on paper.

The history of Britain's cathedrals is celebrated but much less so that of the quarries and quarrymen, who hewed the stone they're built of. On this week's Open Country, Helen Mark rectifies that. With her hard hat to hand she goes underground in the South West.She explores Devon's Beer Quarry Caves which supplied Exeter cathedral with the highest quality limestone, reserved for some of the finest carvings in this and many other medieval churches.Helen meets John Scott who fought hard to make sure that the Beer Quarry Caves weren't demolished in the 1980s. John is a master storyteller who conjures the underground world of generations of anonymous masons and quarrymen at the caves, which are open to the public. They're joined by master mason Peter Dare.At Exeter cathedral the archaeologist John Allan shows Helen the tracery windows and high ribbed ceilings, all carved from the characteristic creamy white Beer stone.Producer: Mark Smalley.

The skiff - a four-person, coxed rowing boat - was traditionally a common sight in the seas off Scotland's coastal communities. Changes in the populations of these towns and villages, many losing their traditional links with the sea altogether, has meant, though, that the racing of skiffs was becoming less common - until, that is, the advent of the self-build kit skiff.Named the St. Ayles skiff (in honour of the Scottish Fisheries Museum, where the idea was born and which is built on the site of St. Ayles Chapel in Anstruther), the huge popularity of the kit skiff has taken the coastal rowing world by surprise. Communities up and down the coastline have banded together to buy, build and then share their own skiff, with some villages buying more than one and women particularly well-represented in the sport.Helen Mark visits Ullapool for a trip out on Loch Broom in the Ulla with the village's over-forty women's crew, enjoying the calm before attending the opening of the inaugural St. Ayles Skiff World Championships. Crews from around the world, linked only by the fact that they have all bought and built their own St. Ayles skiff, have come together for a week's racing and a celebration of coastal rowing. All agree that the skiff has brought unexpected bonuses to their communities, uniting people in fundraising, in boatbuilding and then, finally, in getting out onto the water together.

Helen Mark visits Longshaw Estate in Derbyshire to meet some very special ants...The northern hairy wood ant has an international, near-threatened conservation status with England's two main populations found in the Peak District (including Longshaw) and in the North York Moors. In a cutting edge experiment in communication and conservation, Samuel Ellis, a biologist from the University of York, will be attaching a one millimetre radio receiver to each ant in a bid to understand how the ants communicate and commute between the vast network of nests. 'The way the ants use this network has important implications for how they interact with their environment. And the way information is passed through the network may even have implications for our information and telecommunications networks.' The findings will also influence how the landscape is managed and how the habitat can be improved for the ants.Longshaw Estate is home to more than a thousand nests containing 50 million worker ants. Helen hears from Chris Millner, National Trust Area Ranger at Longshaw who has worked alongside these industrious creatures for many years and from the other non-ant residents of the estate who regularly find themselves surrounded by ants as big as your thumb nail.

The profiles of the two Forth bridges, rail and road, are a familiar and much-loved part of the Edinburgh landscape. Spanning the Firth of Forth between North and South Queensferry, the cantilevers of the rail bridge stand as a monument to Victorian ambition and achievement in engineering and building. Learning lessons from the great Tay Bridge disaster of 1879, its architects took bridge building into an entirely new era and the vision and physical toil involved in its construction leave present-day engineers in awe. A recent ten-year renovation programme has left the bridge in line for World Heritage Site status, while, as Helen Mark discovers, its importance to the people who live and work with it day to day goes far beyond its function as a crossing of the firth. Local people tell Helen that it serves as a constant reminder of the men who laboured to build the bridge and who, in many cases, lost their lives in the process.The road bridge was also a ground-breaker when it was opened in 1964, and quickly became an iconic landmark in its own right. But it will soon find itself overshadowed by a new neighbour, to be named, by public vote, the Queensferry Crossing. The bridge's chief engineer takes Helen to admire the view from the top of one of the road bridge's towers and discusses how it will feel, when the new bridge opens, to surrender the title of Bridgemaster.The murky waters of this stretch of the Firth of Forth will soon have three bridges - one from the nineteenth century, one from the twentieth and one from the twenty first - and for engineers and local people alike, that says something very significant about Scotland and its place in engineering history.

Felicity Evans visits Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. It boasts the largest expanse of chalk grassland in Europe and is home to over two thousand prehistoric sites, including Britain's most iconic pre-historic Stonehenge. Until recently it was thought that Stonehenge was built as an astronomical calendar or observatory but new theories suggest the site was used for ceremonial cremations. Felicity also discusses plans for its future with a new visitor centre and re-direction of a nearby road, reuniting the Stones with the landscape that surrounds it.The last inhabitants of the village of Imber on Salisbury Plain left in the 1940's when the village was requisitioned by the Army. Now it's at the heart of Army training on the Plain and Felicity finds out why. Many of the original cottages are no longer there but the 13th century St Giles Church at Imber has been restored and is open to the public for a few days each year. The Church has a new set of bells and Felicity gets a chance to ring one of them. She also visits a bee farmer who keeps an apiary behind the church. He also talks about the carpet of wild flowers that thrive on the Plain and provide sources of nectar for the bees, enabling them to produce delicious honey flavoured with wild thyme and wild sage.

Woodlands are often the setting for fairy stories but also for the creation of a new childhood game, a secret adventure or a new den and are cherished places. Helen Mark heads to Gloucestershire to see how children, large and small, share a love for the forest.In Berkeley she meets children from a 'forest school' where lessons are taken outside and children are taught to use axes and saws, to identify trees and create and build. While the children teach her how to get involved, she hears it's not just the children who've changed through freedom outside the classroom.Near Tetbury she meets James Shrives and his wife Debs who've crammed 1000 trees into an acre of garden space to create their own forest. The dense growth provides a sanctuary and draws in wildlife but will the pride they've taken in the growth make it heartbreaking to thin down the area?Finally she heads to the edge of Bristol where a council-managed forest at Ashton Court provides an escape for city-dwellers. She joins a group of friends to see how the wild space inspires them and if it can rival their computers and meets author Ingrid Skeels whose own alternative education led her to create St Cuthbert's Wild School for Boys.