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Dylan, it’s a south west seaside resort.

Thanks to you all for helping me to struggle gasping over the line after a mainly not very enjoyable struggle. Perhaps Harribobs will come on the forum as he did on last week’s EV, to offer his own take on the debate. If he reads this, as I’m sure he will, let’s hope he will now give this gimmick a rest, brilliant though it is in its own peculiar way.

One slight weakness in the concept of this puzzle is that one can reach a final grid without having solved all the down clues. Other people have pointed out the disappointing nature of this so-called tour of Britain!

However, when all is said and done, and as has been pointed out, it takes all sorts to make a Listener, so many thanks for your mighty effort, Harribobs!

dylan:

As with the first place, you should write down possibilities for the first two letters given where in the grid you are starting from and which spaces are still available.

Then if you have TEA or something similar you can look for 17-letter, 2-word phrases starting with such a pair.

E.g. if you have AB as the first 2 letters then:

\Ab................. & * * & !* * *

There really aren't that many 2-letter options to test especially if you ignore obvious non-starters like BX

Many thanks Buzzb, for some reason I missed the second letter possibility in my enumeration. All done now, fits beautifully, but an underwhelming mess by the end. I would have liked some sort of message to conclude!

The major flaw in this puzzle, as cleverly constructed as it is, is that you don't need to do Stage 1 at all! And why bother if all you are going to do when you finish it is rub it all out and start again using only the answers to the Across clues, most of which are fairly easy to solve....sorry Harribobs!

Theragman, I confess I don't quite understand your post. If you don't do stage 1 how can you get the two extra destinations? The only thing that a solver could dispense with is solving the down clues if he/she can solve all the acrosses without help from the downs.

Sorry, murky, but that is really what I meant by not completing the first stage. Solving some of the down clues will obviously help you to a certain extent with solving the across clues, but that is all you need to do. You can dispense with filling the first grid, which is as much of a muddle as the second, and then having to clear it.

This puzzle is a bit like Listeners from years ago where one ended up with a grid full of nonsensical strings of letters. It doesn't appeal to me but it might appeal to those who like a puzzle that can be solved just with the help of Chambers and a reference (in this case the Times Atlas).

All, or nearly all of the recent puzzles by this setter (Magpie, Listener, Inquisitor) have been very formulaic - cycled or jumbled entries, and names of people or places hidden or to be revealed (place names seem to be a particular obsession) I now find the repetitious structure of his puzzles very boring. Given the rate at which he's churning them out I suspect he has designed a special computer program to help him construct the grids. All kudos to him, but the grid construction may not have been quite the Gargantuan task that it appears (though I'm sure it will have taken a lot of time).

I quite enjoyed this one. The end game design was new to me but crackable with a bit of logic.
I too suspect the grid construction was not quite as difficult as it might first seem. I spent a while trying to work out how it was done. My guess is you start with a blank grid and add place names backwards following the rule. Start with the longest and make sure you avoid square 1,1. Keep adding place names until you cannot find one to fit. In this case it was 7. Then fill the rest of the grid with random words you can get to fit. Pairing word lengths helps the final grid symmetry. Longer words are harder to fit so finish the fill with 4 then 3 letter words. Finish in square 1,1.
After this the grid rid construction but you have the advantage of cycling and a free hand at down answers to get it to work.
Still very impressive but not as miraculous as it looked at first sight.

Buzzb - I don't think that's right is it? I have ten possible routes to the circle, which helps narrow things down a lot, I agree. After that there are 27 more letters to find. If we assume there are three possible moves for the first 9;say, then 2 for the next 9 then the last 9 are fixed (probably conservative) that's actually just over 100,000,000 different possibilities. Very happy for someone to point out the flaw in this.

Obviously if you guess the first location from the first 3 or 4 letters that narrows it down, but the 17 letter one would still be potentially say 3 cubed * 2 to power 7 say, so over 3,000.