E: 07/03 Win a spa break in Buxton worth up to £1,020

Etch

Sunday Times Where Was I? competition

(www.thetimes.co.uk/travel/where-was-i)

The prize:

The winner and guest will stay for two nights, B&B, at the Buxton Crescent Ensana Health Spa Hotel in Derbyshire. The hotel reopened in late 2020 after an £80 million refurbishment that was 17 years in the making. Its history, however, stretches to the 1780s, when the Crescent was built, cementing Buxton’s status as a fashionable spa town.

Now the spa is the star attraction once again, featuring three pools as well as saunas, steam rooms and mineral baths. The first UK hotel from the spa specialist Ensana Group, it offers treatments that are not available anywhere else in the country.

The prize includes accommodation in one of the hotel’s elegant Crescent Superior rooms, as well as a half-hour spa treatment each for the winner and guest and one dinner for two (excluding drinks) from the Dining Room restaurant’s table d’hôte market menu. It must be taken before June 15, 2024, subject to availability and excluding the period from March 28 to April 2, May 3 to 6 and May 24 to 27.

Questions

1. What was the surname of the star of film and radio?

Answer: Sellers

2. What is the name of the 18th-century installation?

Answer: Fort Cumberland

CloWithTheFlow23

Thank you @Etch for posting and thank you so much for the solutions, I don't think I'd get there on my own!

For other humble copy and pasters such as myself, question 1 is:

What was the surname of the star of film and radio?

Therefore, answer is:

Sellers

Etch

Oops, thanks @CloWithTheFlow23, corrected now. Senior moment on my part!

dunzeye

IMHO - This is certainly one of the more difficult clues of late to solve vis-a-vis Question 2. 

And The Answer is Either Lumps Fort (LF) Or Cumberland Fort (CF) and I don’t think either is a 100% match from the information given in The Clue. But let’s look at the evidence …

 … another installation nearby that has the correct name

LF is the nearer to Southsea Castle and it’s to be found on lumpy ground

… I lead him to the southeastern corner

CF is at the extreme SE corner of Portsea - LF is due South though SE of the plaque

… first built in 18th Century 

CF was probably built from scratch then but LF maybe built on top of earlier installation 

… fences and brambles 

LF has the Rose Garden 

… welcome to one of finest coastal Englands anywhere in a fort

Could this be referring to the Southsea Model Village in LF & why plural

Apart from a distillery in CF which surprisingly doesn’t get a mention - there’s nothing much more than brick-built buildings to see : with odd bits of scrubland (brambles?) growing here and there. 

Whereas LF might have the correct name being related to the lumpy or uneven terrain it’s built on; it’s much nearer Southsea than CF; it has a brambly Rose Garden & a fine example of a coastal english village?

Pay your money & take your choice - it really is 50:50!

BTW - Does the Author of “Where Was I” ever publish a narrative explanation of his/her clues because I’d love to know more about these jigsaw pieces.