There is a form of social networking that requires you to step away from your PC screen and explore the physical world: it’s called geocaching. I headed out with my family today into the Northumberland countryside and found two geocaches: Bamburgh 360 and Dunstanburgh Castle.

The Geocaching.com community web site is a crowdsourced local guide to locations around the world. A page on the Geocaching web site accessed via a Google Map mash-up or a location search describes a physical location together with GPS coordinates and details of a hidden cache. You can also read comments from previous visitors to the cache.

We’re grateful to Broadsword for showing us an unusual view of Dunstanburgh Castle and Davey P for taking us to a location 10 miles further north up the coast that has fantastic panoramic views of Budle Bay, Cheviot, Seahouses and Holy Island.

We retrieved a travel bug called the Little Spring Lion from Dunstanburgh Castle. It’s spent the last 10 months making a 500 mile circuit around Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands and Northumberland.

A travel bug is an item that is tracked via its own log on Geocaching.com and moves from place to place, picking up stories along the way. Little Spring Lion is heading south. It’ll be dropped off at a geocache in London next week.

Tags: crowdsource, geocaching, northumberland, travelbug