Free riddles
Riddles to hide in a tree
A tree is the hiding place teams find fastest and describe worst. Name what a person sees from ten paces, never the species: half a group cannot tell an oak from a hornbeam, and the other half will get there first for the wrong reason. The tag goes in a fork or under a root collar, never in a hollow that collects rain.
Ages 6 to 9
One image per sentence, and the answer is visible from where you stand.
I have a hundred arms and I never wave. Every autumn I drop everything I own.
Hiding placeA tree
I used to be tall. Now I am a seat, and my rings give away my age.
Hiding placeA stump
In summer everybody comes and sits under me. In winter nobody looks at me at all.
Hiding placeA big tree
Somebody tied a rope round me, and children have been swinging from it ever since.
Hiding placeA thick branch
I am the giant’s skin: rough, grey, and nobody ever strokes me.
Hiding placeThe bark
I hold the giant upright, I am under your feet, and sometimes I come out of the ground.
Hiding placeA root
Ages 10 to 14
A turn of phrase to unpick, and a sting in the last line.
Robin Hood would know me. I am old, I am hollow, and something is inside.
Hiding placeAn oak
My shadow goes right round the meadow in a day, and I have not taken a single step.
Hiding placeA tree in the middle of a field
More arms than an octopus, more fingers than a hand, and not one single bone.
Hiding placeA tree
I am the door of a house nobody built, and my tenants have wings.
Hiding placeA nest box
Two initials and a heart, cut thirty years ago by people who no longer speak.
Hiding placeCarved bark
I wear the same coat on the north side all year, and it never dries out.
Hiding placeMoss on the trunk
Adults
An allusion, a piece of irony, and a sentence that flips on its final word.
Ovid would have called me a nymph who stopped running. Look where the trunk opens.
Hiding placeA hollow tree
Three owners have quarrelled over the field; not one ever disputed the boundary it marks.
Hiding placeA march oak
It survived the axe because it was worth nothing, and that is exactly why it is the oldest.
Hiding placeA crooked tree
It was planted on armistice day, and it is older than anybody who remembers why.
Hiding placeA memorial lime
It grew inside a ruin, which proves the roof came down before it did.
Hiding placeA tree in the walls
The ivy has dressed it so long that nobody knows which of the two holds the other up.
Hiding placeAn ivy-clad trunk
Expert
A misleading surface, and a sentence that does not give way on first reading.
What Newton waited for, what the woodcutter counts, what the condemned man dreads: the same place, three times.
Hiding placeA tree
It was pruned once, sixty years ago, and made itself a pocket the rain cannot reach.
Hiding placeA pruning hollow
Its leaves only drop in spring, when the others are growing theirs: that delay is what gives it away.
Hiding placeAn oak
It began as a stone spat out by somebody passing through, and it is all that person left.
Hiding placeA lone tree
Three trunks, one stump: what looks like a family is in fact a single survivor.
Hiding placeA coppice stool
The west wind wrote its address on it: just look at the side it refuses to grow on.
Hiding placeA leaning tree
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.