“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 civil parish, in this case the parish of Selston.
Hint – Before starting this puzzle, you are advised to check what area Selston Parish Council actually covers – it's a lot more than just the village of Selston!
There is no need to visit the posted coordinates, which are not relevant to the puzzle itself.
Your task is to use the clues 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 looks ideal, but you can’t find a matching street, then the chances are that you are wrong (or you’re using an old map!)
- Apple
- Archers’ Eddie
- Battle fought in November 1854
- Buddy’s mount
- Described in a formal management style
- Diced red mango
- Dull location
- First Liberal Prime Minister
- Crosswords, geocaching, scuba-diving – just three examples
- Give Richard a poetic wash
- Gold coin
- Old times there are not forgotten
- Pass me a thin envelope - it’ll fit in there
- Quarter of a pint
- Territory to the left
- The stove is in charge
- The upper or lower stream? No
- They sound like apartments
- Unite GMB and others
- Winnipeg’s here
Once you have solved them, put the 20 street names into alphabetical order, and then use this to calculate the coordinates, which are also somewhere in the civil parish of Selston.
The cache is to be found at N53 0A.BCD W001 1W.XYZ, where:
A = Number of letters in the 2nd street name, minus the number of letters in the 3rd street name
B = Number of vowels in the 19th street name
C = Number of letters in the 15th street name
D = Number of letters in the 16th street name
W = Number of letters in the 12th street name, minus the number of letters in the 5th street name
X = Number of letters in the 1st street name
Y = Number of street names ending with the letter E
Z = Number of street names beginning with the letter M, N, O or P