Free riddles
Riddles for a wall or a stone
A wall is the most reliable target on any ground and the easiest to describe badly. «The old wall» means nothing where there are three: name what only one of them has, a date, the scar of a gate, a change of stone. The tag sits in a joint at knee height, where a hand finds it and a strimmer does not.
Ages 6 to 9
One image per sentence, and the answer is visible from where you stand.
A hundred stones stacked by hand. Look where one of them is missing.
Hiding placeA wall
I am grey, I am cold, and I have a dip where rainwater stays for days.
Hiding placeA big stone
I climb without legs: you go up me one step at a time.
Hiding placeA stone stair
Pebbles piled up by walkers, to say that somebody came this way.
Hiding placeA cairn
Ages 10 to 14
A turn of phrase to unpick, and a sting in the last line.
I am a border to two fields and a house to three families of lizards.
Hiding placeA low wall
There is a date carved into me and nobody alive remembers the day it happened.
Hiding placeA datestone
They laid me flat so that feet would not sink in, and I have stayed ever since.
Hiding placeA flagstone
I am the one the mason put in last, right at the top, and without me it all comes down.
Hiding placeThe keystone
Adults
An allusion, a piece of irony, and a sentence that flips on its final word.
The one the builders rejected, according to the book. Check the corner.
Hiding placeThe cornerstone
It was raised before writing existed, and three religions have borrowed it since.
Hiding placeA standing stone
It bears a date, a mason’s name, and the only lie is the date.
Hiding placeA lintel stone
Taking it down would have cost more than building it, which is why it is still upright.
Hiding placeA terrace wall
Expert
A misleading surface, and a sentence that does not give way on first reading.
Three hundred years upright, and not one drop of water holding it together.
Hiding placeA drystone wall
It marked a limit no paper knew, and both neighbours respected it more than the deeds.
Hiding placeA boundary stone
A threshold, then a paving block, then a step: what counts is not what it is but how often it served.
Hiding placeA reused stone
What the glacier left behind on its way out, and what no man could have put there.
Hiding placeAn erratic boulder
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.