Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

Hint: there's a big castle there which if you live in the UK you have probably visited?

Thank you, ParadigmShifter. I spent some of my early years in Cornwall but never spent much time in Wales.
However, I still think this word is too obscure and that hunting through the WWW for Welsh castles is not what cryptic crosswords are all about.
But, that's just what I think and Guardian setters can do whatever they like.

Whilst I'm not good enough to solve cryptics without using a thesaurus/wikipedia, +occasional google for today's obscure ones, I don't think that's what they are about (at least for semi-noobs like me).

It's about looking up obscure stuff in wikipedia that you'd never have looked up before (e.g. lots of artists/authors/etc.) for me.

I only resort to a missing letters/anagram solver if I am desperate though, and I hate when typing in parts of the clue gives the top result from DanWord which gives you the answer with no explanation, I hate that, try and close my eyes and scroll down as fast as possible then!

Well, tastes differ in crosswords. 😂 (Duh)

I like the wordplay aspect of crosswords. Don't care for barred puzzles (Azed, etc.) because they seem to be mostly about mining esoteric words from Chambers, as opposed to wordplay. Needless to say, barred puzzles have innumerable worthy adherents. 😂

I'm more less with jennaralissimo on this Prize. The saving grace was that I could figure out all the thematics but one. Clue 7 required UK GK pertaining to both cinema and geography, so I failed there. But coming up one word short isn't a bad result.

yeah 1D (said 2D earlier, my mistake, but I had to look that up in "former UK counties too) and 7D was way too obscure.

At least I got in 2 Hawkwind references though :)

7D was a good clue once you parsed it... classic Brian Glover appearance in that film!

My approach to these crosswords is like yours Paradigmshifter - I love all the weird stuff I learn through searching google and Wikipedia, my general knowledge is too patchy on its own.

The only one I’m left unable to parse is 9a… any hints?

It's a homophone. Chambers defines the homophone word as "poetic: sorrow or grief"

Thank you. That’s the other thing crosswording does - increases my vocabulary. 😊

I agree this was (quite) easy for a Prize but IMHO compensated by some excellent clues. I thought 7d was far and away my COD - a beautiful slightly misleading surface which eventually dragged a long -forgotten piece of GK back to the top of my mind for the first word - but then I got 11a which made me laugh out loud.

I parsed 3d with the two -letter note but I think the alternative parsing is better, I was uneasy about 'a name I call myself'

I agree, this was generally a bit easy for a Saturday crossword. But having finally solved most of it, I'm left with two incomplete lights, both of which baffle me – 17dn and 21dn. Would anyone like to give hints?