In General  

The 2005 ATH was in the form of a fox-hunt that took you from West Wycombe to Christmas Common. There are several routes, indeed there are up to five ways to reach each location. I will sometimes use the word �village� for stops on the route, even though they include large towns and more nebulous locations like motorway junctions. In each case the location is indicated by a picture clue � a rebus � all of which are explained below.

Each village has its own web page. To enter a village you need a password. In fact there are several passwords for each village depending on the direction you have come from. However, all the passwords for a given village start with the same letter, which eventually spells a message, as we will see later. You are given a clue to the length of the password needed to enter each new location that is accessible from a given village, as well as a link to its web page. To obtain the password itself you need to solve the puzzles.

On the village web pages, there are countless references to foxes, hounds, hunting and related terms, some of which are useful and some not. And a couple of red herrings have been dragged across the trail in order to put you off the scent.

Every page also has some reference to a previous ATH; the twenty villages thus celebrate the 20 years in which this competition has been held. It was not totally necessary to pick this point up, but all the previous Hunts and answers are available online, so ATH virgins should not have been at too much of a disadvantage. There are some references to the setters of each Hunt; these are really for the amusement of old-timers, and have no bearing on the puzzle itself.

The Home Page

This shows Orion, the Hunter [HOME1], although he looks more like a warrior in this picture - the star pattern gives it away. The music is Mozart's Horn Concerto no 4 in E-flat [HOME2], which itself was written in a type of code, each page of the original score being jauntily notated in a combination of blue, red, green, and black inks in order to confuse the horn player Ignaz Leutgeb, who had commissioned the piece. It is deliberately reminiscent of hunting horns.

The Start of the Hunt

The picture is Mr. Fox's Hunt Breakfast by Harry Neilson [START1]. Uncle Paul is myself and a nod to the fact that I introduced the ATH to Logica over 20 years ago. The �journals� are the records of past Hunts; as we will see, these will prove very useful. The �old chest� is the buried box for which you were looking. The �sculpture of a hippopotamus� is a reference to the prize for the predecessor of the ATH, the infamous pub treasure hunts. The hippo (a cuddly toy with an engraved plaque on a yellow ribbon round its neck) stood on my sideboard for many years until it became the prize in a one-off event held in early 2005 in aid of the Tsunami appeal. �My friend Kit� is a reference to Kit Williams, author of the original and still the best armchair treasure hunt, Masquerade. Most of the rest of the text is as irrelevant as you wish to make it.

What is really useful is the �ancient paper� that has a map on one side and some writing on the other. The map represents the area in which this Hunt is set; the dots are villages and the lines are roads of varying size. Roughly speaking, it has been turned 90 degrees clockwise. My limitations as an artist meant that some people did not realise that the right side of the page is curled over, hiding some of the villages. However, the first village you need to visit, West Wycombe, is particularly prominent, and is a hotspot link to the corresponding web page.

On the other side, the writing reads:

Tally Ho! Everyone saddled and coated red eliminated. Do rich aristocrats like police harassment? Racing after nothing � that�s how ridiculous our undertaking gets. Hounds, horses, every recreation eradicated.

Apart from its possible musings on the abolition of hunting, the text can be used to spell out a question by taking its initial letters � something that you had to do a lot in this Hunt. In this case, the result is �THE SACRED R ALPH RAN THOUGH HERE�. This is a reference to the poem Xanadu [START2] by Coleridge, which starts:

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan

A sacred pleasure dome decree

Where Alph the sacred river ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

To make matters easier, the word �Xanadu� appears in the title bar when you look at the page with the full-size map [START3]. So this is the first password, and gives you access to the clues for West Wycombe. It is also an indication that you should keep an eye on these title bars, as we shall see later.