“An A to Z of …” is an occasional series of mainly cryptic puzzles, a bit like cryptic crosswords. Each one is based on a single town or parish, in this case the parish of Shepshed. The bookmark list links to others in this series and also the “So You Think You Know” puzzles.
If you’re not sure exactly how far the parish boundaries extend, that may be a worthwhile first thing to check. There is no need to visit the posted coordinates, which are not relevant to the puzzle itself. It’s also rather wet there!
Your task is to use the clues below to identify 20 street names in the parish, and then use the answers in a few calculations to arrive at the final cache coordinates. For all of the answers you need to miss out words like “road”, “lane”, “avenue”, etc. Most (but not all) of the answers consist of a single word. If you find an answer to one of the clues that seems ideal, but you can’t find a matching street, then the chances are that you are wrong (or you’re using an old map!)
- Ancient Roman glassworker
- Appears in lists of the “rudest street names”!
- Cagney’s partner
- Container for jam roly-poly
- Cornish saint’s top
- Correct. That hurts!
- February 21st is the day of this plant
- Founder of the Nottingham Evening Post
- Had a hit with “Working my Way Back to you”
- Happy agrarians
- In Russia and Idaho
- Ledger shall change position
- Left lion stung
- Mount St Bernard Abbey parish
- Novelist Murdoch
- Robin Goodfellow – I’ll replace you
- Rules the waves
- Seven stops from Paris Nord on Transilien Line H
- Small berry
- Stop! Well, it sounds as though you should
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 N52 4A.BCD W001 1W.XYZ, where:
A = Number of syllables in the 12th street name
B = Number of letters in the 11th street name
C = Number of letters in the 13th street name
D = Number of times the letter N appears in the 5th, 6th and 7th street names combined
W = Number of letters in the 9th street name, plus the number of letters in the 10th street name
X = Number of street names beginning with the letter N
Y = Number of letters in the 15th street name, plus the number of vowels in the 17th street name
Z = Number of street names beginning with the letter B or C