An offshoot from my “So you think you know…” series of puzzles, based on place names within a specific district council area. “An 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, which are in the middle of a large supermarket - they are not relevant to the puzzle itself. The actual cache is somewhere in Belper. To find out where it is, you need to solve the mainly cryptic clues below to identify 20 street names in the civil parish of Belper.
Belper is a large and very historic town, but the parish extends to include Milford and Makeney (a fact that may or may not be of significance).
For the calculations, you need to miss out words like “road”, “street”, etc. All but two of the answers you are looking for consist 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!)
- A bit piggy perhaps, but further north
- Best chick carved up
- Cheshire bank
- County trees
- Elizabeth was all by herself
- Founded in 1884, now owned by M and S
- Founder of a US state
- Gentlemen. This is half a league town.
- He knew what the butler saw
- In stopping less often, you will find what you need
- Ivy’s friend grows here
- L92 destroyer
- Men of Harlech escaped, but were trapped inside
- Named after the Swedish Nightingale?
- No jug? Ashton will get it.
- Published a railway guide
- Rocky pasture
- Scratchy place to spend the night
- Tom the diver has left
- What Italian / French wine
Once you have solved them, put the 20 street names into alphabetical order, and then use this to calculate the coordinates.
The cache is to be found at N53 0A.BCD W001 VW.XYZ, where:
A = Number of letters in the 12th street name, minus the number of letters in the 13th street name
B = Number of times an apostrophe appears (or should appear according to the rules of grammar!) in any of the street names.
C = Number of street names beginning with the letter J, plus number of street names beginning with the letter S
D = Number of street names that end with the letter H
V = Number of letters in the 15th street name, minus the number of letters in the 14th street name
W = Number of letters in the 3rd street name
X = Number of letters in the 8th street name
Y = Number of street names beginning with the letter P
Z = Number of letters in the 18th street name