Listen With Others

What a construction – congratulations Harribobs!

With the ‘after cycling’ pun at the start and the complexity of the rest of the Preamble that followed, this looked like it was going to be tough.

Stage 1: The entered clues with ‘most answers initially entered after cycling’

Fortunately most of the clues were gentle, otherwise this would have been particularly taxing!  After filling out almost all of the first grid, I wasted a bit of time by stupidly counting down the columns rather than across the rows and only realised my mistake when the first destination didn’t fit in the circle – a very useful check, by the way!

Having filled in all but the last 30 cells, I am not quite sure how I managed to solve it but it only seemed to take a little bit of jiggling and the missing two places jumped out.  I went along the slightly wrong route to begin with, trying to shoehorn SHEPHERDS BUSH into the gaps … but soon found SHEPTON MALLET, and BUDLEIGH SALTERTON followed almost immediately afterwards.

Stage 2: After re-filling!

Thanks again to Harribobs for a very cleverly constructed crossword!  I still can’t quite see how you did it, which has got to be the mark of an excellent puzzle!

Cheers & keep safe all,                   

Tim / Encota