Free riddles
Riddles for a sign or a plaque
A sign is the only hiding place that already carries words, and that is the opportunity: a riddle can quote it, twist it, or count its letters. Watch the seasons, though. A noticeboard gets repainted, a temporary sign moves, and a tag stuck to something that changes outlives its own clue.
Ages 6 to 9
One image per sentence, and the answer is visible from where you stand.
I point all day long and nobody ever thanks me.
Hiding placeA signpost
I stand very still, made of stone, so that you remember someone who cannot.
Hiding placeA statue
I am nailed to a post at the edge of the road, and drivers read me without slowing down.
Hiding placeA place-name sign
I have a mouth at the front and nobody feeds me. The postman fills me.
Hiding placeA letterbox
I tell the time with no battery and no hands, but only when the weather is fine.
Hiding placeA sundial
I stand at the edge of the path, arms out sideways, and I point at nothing.
Hiding placeA wayside cross
Ages 10 to 14
A turn of phrase to unpick, and a sting in the last line.
I am peppered with small round holes, and not one of them was made by a screw.
Hiding placeA shot-holed sign
Turn me around and I still point somewhere. That is the whole problem.
Hiding placeA signpost
I carry an arrow and I aim at nobody. Follow me and you arrive; doubt me and you circle.
Hiding placeA fingerpost
I am painted on a tree every five hundred metres, and without me you get lost.
Hiding placeA waymark
I carry the name of a family that left the house twenty years ago.
Hiding placeA letterbox plate
I show the wind without ever following it, and I squeak when it changes.
Hiding placeA weathervane
Adults
An allusion, a piece of irony, and a sentence that flips on its final word.
A name, two dates, and a small line between them. Everything that mattered is in the line.
Hiding placeA memorial plaque
Ninety-two names for a village that never held three hundred. Nobody reads the list through any more.
Hiding placeA war memorial
Two parishes have argued over who owns it since it fell, and neither will stand it up.
Hiding placeA boundary board
It advertises a shop that shut forty years ago, and that is exactly what makes it precious.
Hiding placeA painted shopfront sign
Somebody straightens it every time a lorry clips it, and nobody knows who any more.
Hiding placeA street plate
A saint whose story nobody recalls, at a junction whose smaller branch nobody takes.
Hiding placeA wayside shrine
Expert
A misleading surface, and a sentence that does not give way on first reading.
It was put back the wrong way round during repairs, and in forty years nobody has reported it.
Hiding placeA reversed direction arm
The only book in the village whose pages are stone and whose last line is a date.
Hiding placeA memorial stele
It was raised for a man whose deeds nobody remembers and whose name everybody knows.
Hiding placeA statue
It counts the miles to a town the road no longer serves, since they built the bypass.
Hiding placeA milepost
The stonecutter ran out of room at the end, and it is the last word that carries the proof.
Hiding placeA cramped inscription
It has changed name three times without moving an inch, and the oldest of the three still shows underneath.
Hiding placeAn old street plate
By hiding place
Make these riddles real
A riddle on paper stops at the answer. Here it opens a proximity radar, a QR label on a real hidden object, and a screen that says who found it first.