It seems that Ken had an easier time with this than did I. For quite a while I had the long central down entry but little else in the grid – I plodded on. That’s OK, I enjoyed it – thanks for the blog.

To clear up a few points :
1 – The original song refers to mountainS (plural) although the Burl Ives version (which I suspect solvers are more familiar with) does not. In fact it differs in several other ways too.
2 – SAGAS = [G]AS (rev) + G + AS. Retrospectively, I’d have to agree this wasn’t a brilliant clue!
3 – AutonYmous – my submitted (Word document) version had autonOmous, so I don’t know when the error crept in, but I should have spotted it. Apologies.
4 – Dedication – coincidentally, my daughter was married on the day of publication. John and the Indy team kindly allowed me a bit of self-indulgence!!

I thought this was a great puzzle. I love alphabetical jigsaws (invented by Araucaria?) and with the extra complexity of extra letters and the exercise of re-arranging these in clue order and then finding the question from the initial clue letters, I found this one of the most enjoyable Inquisitors for a long time. Pity about autonYmous!

I agree with Al about SAGA, though the G logically came from (G)as. It would be “cheating” to clue a letter individually, then remove it.