“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 village, in this case Spondon.
The bookmark list links to others in this series and also the “So You Think You Know” puzzles.
Being part of the city of Derby, Spondon is not a civil parish, so you can’t just check where its boundaries are. But it is easy to work out where Spondon starts and ends – for this puzzle, you shouldn’t look at anything south of the River Derwent, nothing west of Ascot Drive, and don’t stray into Erewash. 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 Spondon street names, 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. 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!)
- At the side of the canal
- Bundles of wool ready for spinning
- Carnivorous plant
- Easterly girl
- Fanny needs a penny
- G. K. author
- Inert cloud all over the place? Yes, but not to the left.
- Is he from Venice?
- Made vast profits. An inside deal perhaps.
- Mount Windsor
- Named an ocean
- Officially opened by King George VI in 1945
- Olive users age when drunk
- Rest comfortably
- Shed feathers
- Sounds like Huddersfield and Dewsbury belong here
- Strange fast corn
- The vicar’s territory
- Unilever brand
- Unusual name for a smoke-extracting device
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 54.ABC W 001 24.DEF, where:
A = Number of letters in the 14th street name.
B = Number of street names beginning with the letter R.
C = Number of letters in the 10th street name, minus the number of letters in the 13th street name.
D = Number of street names beginning with the letter H
E = Number of letters in the 7th street name.
F = Number of street names beginning with the letter P