Puzzle #47 — 2026-09-04
The answer was France. The scene was built from Artenay. Difficulty: medium.
The clues, in the order they were revealed
- A dead-flat cereal plain running to the horizon with no hedges at all.
- Plane trees with pale mottled trunks line the road into the village.
- Houses are rendered in pale limestone and shuttered in grey wood.
- A low stone war memorial stands at the junction, as one does in every village here.
- The country is the largest member of the European Union by area.
What the scene was built from
The location is chosen first, from a hand-curated whitelist, and the image is generated to match the description below. That order is what makes the answer checkable: the scene is built for the place, not guessed from the picture.
| vegetation | an unbroken cereal plain with no hedges at all, a line of plane trees along the road |
|---|---|
| terrain | dead-flat limestone plain running to the horizon |
| architecture | rendered limestone houses with grey wooden shutters, a tall concrete grain silo above the rooftops |
| roadside | right-hand traffic, plane trees with pale mottled trunks, a low stone war memorial at the junction as in every village here |
| signage | Latin script, a Romance language (never rendered legibly) |
| light | soft north-European sun and very long afternoons |
Where this actually is
Artenay, France sits at 48.08, 1.88 — see Artenay, France on OpenStreetMap. The clue ladder and the table above were both written from that place before any picture existed.
This day was not in the image-quality sample — its answer key was checked, its picture was not second-guessed. How the pictures are made, and why none of them is a photograph.