Welcome to Tales from the Towpath! If you’ve arrived at this page from a link on Geocaching.com or Opencaching.com, and don’t know anything about this project, this is where you can find out all about it.

Tales from the Towpath is a live textural treasure hunt: we’ve created a story that weaves together fact, fiction and new mythology. It traverses time and locations, and emerges in multiple formats. Fragments of the past can be found in a series of 5 geocaches hidden around Manchester’s canals and historic buildings. Visions of the future can be found in Zappar codes also located in the canals area. The present will take place in a live performance on Friday 17 October. Floating amongst all of this are an origami boat and micro-projections, offering further glimpses of the story.

You too can add your voice to this collaborative story. From 6 October, you will be able to contribute text, image, audio or video via this web site. Story contributions will be woven into the final performance.

Two workshops in interactive story creation are being offered as part of the project, if you are interested in learning about the process and tools used to create this story, and how you could create your own.

Tales from the Towpath is part of the Manchester Literature Festival and runs from 6-19 October 2014. Following this, we will be making documentation and story fragments available on this web site. The geocaches will remain in place in Manchester for as long as we are able to maintain them.