More straightforward clues than usual from Harribobs thanks, no doubt, to the unhelpful nature of the cross-checking. After 3 failed attempts (largely miscounting) I've got all the entered words in, but am stuck with the two unclued destinations. I can make the circled space the 5th letter of a place, but not the 4th. Have I miscounted again?
Hi Sunray. We have the first, second, fourth and sixth letters of 35 ac and it still won’t parse. Incidentally, they are not the letters you mentioned. We know everything else fits as we’ve got the five locations. Similar situation with 18 ac. Going to attempt to follow the rest of the grid refill and see what turns up. Good hunting!
18ac now completed.
Teaching grandma to suck eggs but.....
Don’t attempt to move to the grid clear and refill stage until every clue is separately solved.
The last letter of your known across entries should go in the 13dn cell. That should then lead you to the cell where the first letter of the first unclued destination goes. If we know the first cell and the fourth cell, there are a few permutations for what can be cells 2 and 3. Map out a decision tree and eliminate the nonsense combinations to cutdown your options. It will all fall into place once you hit upon the right path.
In phase 2, do we enter the across answers as we entered them in originally or spelled correctly? Also, do we leave in the down answers, only I've got an F in 4,12 but there's no F in 8d?
Got it, I was puzzled because there are only 120 letters in total for the across clues but 144 in the grid and the preamble says every cell is filled, but I hadn't taken in to account the 2 extra unclued entries.