Church Micro 1...Earlswood

The Church Micro 1...Earlswood geocache (GC17878) was placed on 7 November 2007 by sadexploration, at Earlswood, south of London in England. A quiet multi-cache: you gather a few pieces of information at the church, work the final coordinates out of them, and go and fetch the box. Nothing suggested it was about to found the largest themed series in geocaching.

Behind the nickname hides Steve. Without being a believer, he admires the architecture of churches and saw in them the ideal point of interest, "which is after all what geocaching is about". He placed the first fifty or so Church Micros himself, then edited his listings to invite other geocachers to add their own, taking it upon himself to keep the list and hand out the numbers. As early as 2008, a cacher named BaSHful set up the statistics and the website of the series; the machine ran away with itself.

For its fifteenth birthday, in November 2022, the series was nearing 16,000 caches, placed by more than 2,600 different geocachers in the United Kingdom and beyond. Every form is there - traditionals, multis, mysteries, earthcaches, wherigos - and, despite the name, the container does not have to be a micro. The 10,000th was placed at Tintern Abbey, in Wales. 7 November has become Church Micro Day, punctuated by anniversary events all over the country.