An offshoot from my “So you think you know…” series of puzzles, based on place names within a specific district council area. The “ABC of …” puzzles are similar but with a much smaller geographical area, looking at a single town or parish, and identifying street names rather than place names. Because of this, the Difficulty rating is a little lower than the district-wide puzzles – after all, Google gives you all the street names!
There is no need to visit the posted coordinates, unless you fancy a game of cricket, as they are not relevant to the puzzle itself.
For this puzzle, you need to solve the mainly cryptic clues below to identify 21 street names in Aldercar and Langley Mill.
Aldercar and Langley Mill is a single civil parish, and since 1984 it has been represented by 13 parish councillors. If you want to really score some points you can tell me where Aldercar ends and Langley Mill begins, for it has been a discussion point for as long as I can remember. (It is actually possible to draw a border between them now, as Aldercar did become an ecclesiastical parish in its own right a few years ago – though I’m not convinced that the boundary is right!) As well as the built-up area, the parish also covers the hamlets of Stoneyford and Woodlinkin.
For the calculations, you need to miss out words like “road”, “street”, etc. All but one of the answers you are looking for consists of a single word. And if you find an answer to one of the clues that looks ideal, but you can’t find a matching street, then the chances are that you are wrong (or you’re using a very old map!)
- Brand of butter
- Broke a boil by twisting a bee out of it
- Confused a robot. Or not
- Detective Sergeant Alder got mixed up
- Emberg
- French gold sphere
- Grant and Phil
- Grassy meadows
- Langley Mill pottery brothers
- Mrs Hudson’s lodger
- My eastern link
- NCC-1701
- Neither red nor green
- Pattern of diamonds
- Prime Minister for 12 years
- Pull your offspring
- Scrooge
- Street for the loner?
- These are the lyrics Ash arranged
- This is a hymn Ali messed about with
- TSB or Nat West
Once you have solved them, put the 21 street names into alphabetical order, and then use this to calculate the coordinates.
The cache is to be found at N53 AB.CDE W001 VW.XYZ, where:
A = Number of letters in the 18th street name, minus the number of letters in the 20th street name
B = Number of street names which end with the letter N
C = Number of street names beginning with the letter G
D = Number of times the letter U appears in any of the street names
E = Number of letters in the 9th street name
V = Number of street names beginning with the letter L
W = Number of letters in the 13th street name
X = Number of letters in the 5th street name, minus the number of letters in the 7th street name
Y = Number of letters in the 8th street name
Z = Number of street names beginning with the letter R