Day three

Day three time! I’m still on the streak for now, and I’m feeling pretty good about it!

Today’s challenge I actually managed to get done in about 5 minutes. I didn’t add it into yesterday’s post but I had actually managed to claim rank 58 of that days challenge. This is based off of how quickly you solve the challenge so it was nice to see I wasn’t too slow.

Although I finished the challenge quickly I didn’t actually start it until I was finished up with work for the day. Who knows, maybe I’ll try to claim 1st place in the upcoming challenges!

Question

A little further down this street, on a day in November 2022, there stood a rather unusual character. Who was it?

Immediately we can see that this is a screenshot taken from Google Street-View! No more dutch angles of Café’s with hundreds of flags in it.

I’ll admit that I laughed a little bit when I read the name of the street… ‘The St’. My initial thought was that this was somewhere in England. I’ve been to some of the bigger cities in England as well as the smaller little villages and this definitely looked like the latter. The road-sign reading ‘Single file traffic’ is one that you’ll find all over small towns in England where the buildings are tightly packed together (from before cars were a thing… I’m guessing?).

We can see a church and some gravestones to the right, but that’s not really what’s important in the image.

To the left of the image (Across the The Street street from the church) is a pub. If we zoom in a little bit we can make out the name:

THE LEATHER BOTTLE

I thought this sounded like a pretty unique name at first so I searched Google Maps for any pubs in England with that name. As it turned out there were quite a few of them.
The original photo shows clear blue skies so we can pretty safely assume that this location is not in a big city. Almost all of the Leather Bottle’s that I found were around London, so I focused on the results that were outside of the city limits. Only a few scrolls later I found this:

846 reviews and a 4.3 star average rating? Nicely done!

We can see that this is a very small little town. The church grounds (denoted in darker green) seems to take up a sizable area of this town (If it even counts as a town 😬). This seems like the likely candidate, so let’s take a look at streetview to confirm:

Awesome, that confirms where the location is!

We can focus on the actual question for the challenge now;

A little further down this street, on a day in November 2022, there stood a rather unusual character. Who was it?

I changed the date to November 2022 and went forwards ever so slightly. I noticed that there was now a sign on the entrance to the church grounds. In my excitement to get the answer I misread ‘Cobham Church’ as ‘Gotham Church’ and I almost entered ‘Batman’ as my answer:

If you look closely on the right hand side of the above image you’ll see a strange looking character. I hadn’t even noticed them when I was first annotating the screenshot but after reading ‘Cobham’ properly I spotted them quickly and moved closer.

Further on down the street we get a much clearer view of this familiar character:

No need to add ‘The’ to the beginning of their name, in case you got stuck.

Conclusion

Another neat little challenge! I didn’t even need to find help on the OSINT4Fun Discord, or be connected to a French VPN today.

It’s possible that the English look of the original image could have been a ploy. I recently read about Huawei’s European themed model village recently which could make for an interesting OSINT challenge at some point. It would be annoying (even moreso given that there’s no Google Streetview of the campus) but still could be a fun challenge.

Anyway, day three done! See you on day four!