The Spring Quiz - results

I won't be around to do anything with this tomorrow, and I've had no responses at all for the last week about the Quiz, so I'll close it a day early, with my sincere thanks to the 22 people who submitted entries - or comments and (mostly) emails which looked like entries.

I very much enjoyed reading the explanations and reasoning - it was possible to score as many points for an entertaining justification of the wrong place as for no justification at all for a near miss. Thank you again to anyone who took part, or who thought about it but didn't send an entry.

My two winners are JohnPreece, who scored highly all round and was a remarkable half a kilometre out, and Vive l'Empereur, who did a good line in reasoning and finished up with a stab which was only 40 Km off. I also read some nice reasons why it was Portugal, or Spain, or Greece, or Provence. In fact the photo was taken on private land, from the access road at the wine production estate of La Mormoraia, looking almost due south towards the ancient town of San Gimignano, Tuscany, Italy, which is the collection of towers on the hill in the distance. Access to the winery is off the minor road linking San Gimignano with Certaldo, just north of the hamlet of Sant' Andrea. I reckon this is 3.5 Km as the crow flies, so John was very close indeed.

I stayed with my family in a self-catering apartment at La Mormoraia that year - in a heatwave! - and became a loyal and regular customer at the big Co-op in San Gimignano, which has splendid air-conditioning. The estate is a phenomenal place for a holiday - everything that Tuscany is supposed to be - and the house wine is a bit special too.

The best of the runners-up were Jiminho, Prof De Vries, Mrs Crick, Angelo, Xaltotun of Python, Paul Dempster, Martin S, Dino Di Monnaco (who lives just a few miles from the target area), Patrick Walsh and rosso471.

I'll contact the winners to get postal addresses for the prizes. Thank you all again. You have helped make a happy man very old.