“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 town of Stapleford. The bookmark list links to others in this series and also the “So You Think You Know” puzzles.
Stapleford does have its own parish council, so the boundaries used for this puzzle are clearcut – if you don’t know where Stapleford starts and finishes, you can find a map online that will show you. There is no need to visit the posted coordinates, which are not relevant to the puzzle itself, and which would also be rather wet.
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; likewise, if a street name begins with “The”, this should be omitted. All but one 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!)
- 0 = 273.15
- Animal enclosure
- Break your word
- Clump of trees, neither left nor right
- Dan and Doris in 1950
- Judge son after he removed 32
- LQ, TK or CF, for example
- Never called Angus by the Bellamys
- Not a short distance to this lair
- Nottingham estate
- Painted sand heaps
- Quintus … Flaccus
- Rex or Ford
- Sounds like a neighbourly street
- Tesla leads all
- Their tar is mixed
- Tie up to the pontoon
- Unaspirated formicary
- Wannabes selling internal content
- Wiltshire brewery needs southern insertion
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 N 52 5A.BCD W 001 1W.XYZ, where:
A = Number of letters in the 17th street name
B = Number of letters in the 5th street name
C = Number of letters in the 3rd street name
D = Number of letters in the 12th street name, minus the number of letters in the 11th street name
W = Number of street names ending with the letter N
X = Number of street names ending with the letter K
Y = Number of letters in the 14th street name.
Z = Number of street names beginning with the letter H