32 comments on “Inquisitor 1555: Landmark by Pointer”

1. Like you, kenmac, I saw Settle in RESETTLEMENT in the ‘south’ of the grid quite early on and wondered if an area of Britain between Settle and Carlisle would be relevant. Further progress with the clues yielded a handful of ‘m’s below the grid, but at that stage I didn’t suspect anything as I also had some iffy possibilities down there as well, like i, o and v.

   Having decided, on a hunch, to look up Settle in a road atlas and look mainly north along the railway, I found Ribblehead Viaduct. I immediately recognised it from pictures I found online. More to the point, I could see that it had a lot of arches, and the connection with the ‘m’s down below became obvious.  And Carlisle was way off the map!

   The only difficulty I had with this puzzle arose from what the preamble didn’t say. We were told what to do in the event of clashes, but we were given no indication of how many of these there might be. I found it disconcerting for a while not knowing whether I could rely on any crossing letters.

   I guessed the three PK squares were peaks, although for a while I thought the more easterly one could have been a park. I somehow missed Pen-y-ghent. I phoned a friend to get Dent, the other place name – it was on my map but I missed it.

   The temporary difficuty I had did not detract from an enjoyable solve, and I thought the theme was imaginatively executed.  I liked the two clues with a foreign-language element: CEDILLA and GERMANISE.

   Many thanks to Pointer and kenmac.

2. I enjoyed filling the grid and enjoyed the PDMs.  I started off looking for landmarks with columns, Trafalgar square or similar, with the PKs being parks.  Then I figured out railway arches and started adding for inner-city railway infrastructure to my search.  Finally I saw Settle and got to the correct landmark.  So misdirection to start with and a succession of PDMs all good.

   The drawback with the puzzle was that the instructions were vague as to how many items we were looking for, and in what way they were represented.  How to know when you are finished? Also I didn’t see “PK” appearing on any of the maps I looked at.  PK could be “peak” or “park” or who knows what else.  In fact Ingleborough, Whernside et al would definitely not appear on a map as “Ingleborough Peak” etc (with or without abbreviation) as peak is not in their names.  If we were to deduce the items because together they form the “Three Peaks” then surely this representation is just as cryptic as “R” to indicate the “Ribblehead Viaduct”. Why do the instructions indicate one representation as cryptic but not the other?  There were several “parks” actually written on the maps I looked at and these looked equally viable.

   I got the feeling that the instructions were a bit of an afterthought and not given the same attention to detail as the main body of the puzzle.  Sorry to sound so critical as I did enjoy the solving the puzzle very much.  All meant as hopefully helpful feedback.

   Thank you Pointer and kenmac.

3. I enjoyed this. I thought the R for Ribblehead was inspired. The “three peaks” were well known to me as a young man, having spent several walking holidays there.

   I never saw the pleasure in racing up mountains, so the three peaks race passed me by.

   When I first went there Pen-y-Ghent was reached by a muddy track and involved wading through the peat hags near the summit. On a subsequent occasion, many years later, I was amazed to find a metaled pathway leading up the hill and a wooden walkway across the peat. The potholes (Hull Pot and Hunt Pot) were a source of wonder and danger.

   I never went on the Settle-Carlisle railway, but saw the viaduct from afar. Thanks to Pointer for a nice reminder of the past – no Trilby/Fedora tricks here – and to Kenmac for the blog.

4. An enjoyable solve, but for me at least – having never heard of any of the locations referenced (mea culpa) – the end game was more of a Google than a PDM.

5. Lots to enjoy and admire, but I’d agree with kenmac’s overall verdict on this one. It seemed flawed in places, mostly from vagueness in the preamble, but also some clues I was unsure of. After working at it I parsed most of them to my satisfaction, but I was left with the same two questions. Looking again now though I see that the clue for LOGIA, in row h, is presumably loggia, a covered arcade, minus a g (group). Still don’t know how ‘lesser’ gives UNCO though.

   I didn’t like the ‘several items’ in the preamble – I was left feeling that I may have missed something (and, given Pointer’s history, still wonder if I have). My initial thought was that the PKs were parks, so perhaps the snake-like series of ms represented the Serpentine and it was London parks I needed. That didn’t seem to fit and my PDM came from looking for likely ‘alternative names’ in the grid, with Batty Moss ringing loud bells (but still needing Google to link it together). I didn’t really think through the PK, which perhaps explained part of my dissatisfaction in the end. I just assumed they were still parks, with two National Parks roughly fitting two positions and the Forest of Bowland, though not a designated National Park, the third.

   Having said all of that, I enjoyed most of this process and memories of a beautiful area of the country.

6. Hmm. If Settle has moved to the south coast and Hove has miraculously scuttled off to the east coast then I spy with my little eye something beginning with R.

7. Enjoyed. Thanks to Pointer and kenmac. I spent a while following the ASCOT red herring, with the PK directly above it “obviously” being Windsor Safari Park, but identifying the other two PKs as parks was difficult. When I thought of them as Three Peaks it stirred a memory — though I’ve never been in the area — and Google then revealed the viaduct, a much more plausible interpretation of all those lower-case Ms than the Ordnance Survey graphic for cliffs (yes, a lot of wishful thinking there but it was the only idea I’d had up to then). R = Ribblehead seemed neat enough. After which, BATTY MOSS and SETTLE leapt out but DENT needed more work.

   One niggle about the diagram above: surely the rows were lettered and the columns numbered in the original, rather than the other way round? 1D (which seemed OK to me) requires numbered columns, and I remember wondering whether I should admire the little extra flourish of mmmmmmmmmmmm appearing in (well I never) row m.

8. Thanks kenmac

   As no one else has come up with a parsing for the second entry in row f, I will offer a possible explanation. One synonym of ‘lesser’ is junior. If you ‘shell’ this you end up with [j]UNIO[r] but this would mean that either the clue is an &lit (somewhat of a stretch!) or ‘shell’ is doing double duty.

9. DL @7
   Regular readers will probably realise that I usually label the columns (letters) and rows (numbers) as I find that it makes it easier to refer to unclued entries and the like. Pointer decided to do it the opposite way and I wondered whether to include my usual labels, tossed a coin (figuratively) and ended up with both.

   Gaufrid @8
   Hmm… you may be right, though I don’t like it much. Maybe setter or editor will pop in and put us right.

10. Gaufrid – an ingenious theory, I am impressed!  In addition to your other observations JUNIOR shell would be JR.  JUNIOR shelled would be UNIO.

11. I found this slow going in parts, but don’t have many of the quibbles mentioned above – I thought most of the puzzle was fine. (I started it during the rain-stopped-play breaks on the Sunday of the Lord’s test match – a friend had a spare ticket.) A decade ago, at the end of a week’s hike in the Yorkshire Dales four of us travelled back from Dent to Ilkley over the said viaduct – magnificent – and was well aware of the (Yorkshire) Three Peaks Challenge. And I wondered about TRAIN in row 8 …

    LOG(G)IA was not a problem but UN_O was: I went for UNIO since at least it means “shell”. At one point I thought the wordplay might be (j)UNIO(r) but that would entail removing the shell (JR) rather than the shell itself. And I never did sort out the top row, so thanks to elmac for that and Ken for the rest.

    Collins gives DIADROM (col.2) as “the complete course or oscillation of something, especially of a pendulum” which explains “bob“.

12. Kenmac @9: Oops. Sorry! Somehow I saw only the more prominent labelling (and could argue the setter’s should have been given that privilege, but never mind).

13. I see that comments 8, 9 & 10 snuck in before I hit “send” and ended up as #11.

14. Re: UNIO The only thing we could think of for this is JUNIOR for LESSER with the ‘shell’ removed leaving UNIO for shell. Of couse the clue doesn’t actually say that so we remain baffled.

15. I didn’t know of the ‘three peaks’ mentioned here first by kenmac and later by others who already knew of them.  That confirms to me that all three PKs are indeed peaks, whereas I thought originally that one might have been a park.

    I’d like to make the point that the only requirement for a complete solution was to fill in the grid, write 12 ‘m’s in the box below and highlight BATTY MOSS.  We didn’t have to identify the three peaks or the two place names.  Sorry for stating the obvious, but I thought it worth putting the ‘several items’ mentioned in the preamble in their proper place (so to speak): they were there as possible pointers to the theme (SETTLE was for me) but could otherwise be ignored or used in an optional extra game of ‘find the items’.  (I played that game but failed on DENT and the third peak.)

    Some vagueness about the preamble has been mentioned by a few of us, but the only ‘vague’ point that troubled me initially was not being told how many clashes there were.  For all we knew there could have been a lot.  I called this a ‘temporary difficulty’ in my earlier comment because after a while I simply forced myself into assuming, first, that all crossing letters were good until proven otherwise.  I can quite believe that more experienced solvers, or those who are better at ‘cold solving’ than I am, were not put off at all by this vague instruction, but I had to make the mental effort to work round it.  I thought in retrospect that it would have done no harm to be told that there were three clashes in total.

16. Alan B @15: as one of the “more experienced solvers” (as you put it), I was slightly put off by several, but I can see why Pointer didn’t want to say “three clashes” – that would have removed a small step in the discovery that the occurrences of the PK’s referred to the Three Peaks.
    (And your strategy of assuming “that all crossing letters were good until proven otherwise” is sensible, and one I adopt on many similar occasions.)

17. If there’s a red herring to be had I’ll go for it, and so it’s no surprise that I spent ages trying to connect THE OAKS, ASCOT and the surrounding parks with a series of Ms (12 miles? 12000 metres?). My fault that I got so hung up on the diversion that I forgot the case and contiguous bit from the preamble for a while; only when I realised this did realise I was looking for a bridge with 24 arches and things started to fall into place.

    Interesting that Ribblehead = R and its like is OK in cryptic representations in grids, but (one hopes) would never be used this way in an actual clue.

    The nearest I got to parsing UNIO was along the lines Gaufrid suggests, but the cryptic grammar is still wrong (“lesser shells” would sort of work).

    I wasn’t happy with the wording of some of the preamble, which implied that there was far more to be found in the completed grid. I suppose that “several” can be anything more than one, but with the clashes and highlighted entries separately mentioned in the preamble, I feel that this was a misdirection too far.

    Puzzles with endgames that take far longer than the grid fill aren’t my thing, especially when there is still some doubt at the end. I found this a direct contrast to Schadenfreude’s well-balanced and neat Redgrave puzzle. Still, that’s just one opinion and I’m glad others got more out of this than I did.

18. Alan @15 – a good point that only BATTY MOSS needing to be highlighted to send in a solution.  However it still seems unsatisfactory to have shaded the correct cells without conclusively identifying the supporting material.

19. I agree with several of the above quibbles.

    Rarely do I ‘see’ patterns in the grid that are alleged to be there, but on this occasion I saw an aquaduct straight away, and Settle soon followed, and therefore Ribblehead.

    Making good gut, for Germanise, was brilliant. Impossible, then suddenly obvious.

    Thanks to Pointer and kenmac for helping with some very difficult parsing.

20. HG @11

    Kicking myself over LOGIA. I had it during the solve but had forgotten it by the time I came to blog. I’m sure that’s happened to all bloggers now and again.

    HG @13
    I’m not sure what you mean.

     

21. kenmac
    There were only 7 comments when I was composing what turned out to be not comment 8 but comment 11: before I posted, Gaufrid had come in with his remark on UNIO, followed by your response to him, and also PeeDee‘s. So I was putting my first comment into context, namely that my stab at (j)UNIO(r) was independent of Gaufrid‘s.

22. Many thanks to Pointer for a hugely enjoyable puzzle. I really appreciated the creativity involved and was impressed by the amount of detail included in the grid. Some lovely clues too. I’m not so familiar with the landmark involved but once it became apparent that there would be 12x m my first thought was to hunt for a 24-span bridge, and so it proved.

    I fail to see the problem with the non-specific number of clashes. Surely lots of puzzles have been similarly vague?

23. I was surprised by the number of negative comments about this puzzle as there are several clever and original elements, eg:

    1. Dropping an m to the bottom of each column to represent the key landmark. I was fooled for a while into thinking these showed rolling hills, eg the South Downs, but not only are they a good representation of a railway viaduct there are 24 arches, as at Ribblehead

    2. Placing the five locations pretty accurately on the “map”.

    3. Ribblehead =R. Unlike cruciverbophile@17 I’d be very happy to see something similar in clues and it does happen occasionally. I can’t think of specific examples, but they usually make me smile. Perhaps more likely to be seen in the Listener?

    4. Some very clever clues, notably those for NINE-HOLE, EDITOR, CEDILLA and GERMANISE. Like Alan B@1 I welcome references to other languages.

    As for the quibbles about the instructions, “several” seems reasonable for five and the Three Peaks, like the Settle-Carlisle railway and the Ribblehead viaduct, are among the best known features of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, so once you’ve established the general location it’s surely not a big jump to identify a PK clash as a peak and look for two more. What was obscure, even to a Yorkshireman, was Batty Moss but that was easy to find online.

    So congratulations to Pointer from me at least (I don’t expect a variation on Soprano every time, that would get very tiresome) and thanks to Kenmac for the map showing the geographical accuracy.

24. Terrier @23: I’ve been solving the Listener regularly since the mid-nineties and have never seen Gateshead = G and its variants appear in a clue. I don’t expect to either, as the Listener clueing requirements are strictly Ximenean. It’s quite common in the Guardian, on the other hand.

25. Good point, cruciverbophile. I don’t see the Guardian very often, so am probably thinking of Dean Mayer’s puzzles which appear in the Sunday Times every three weeks.

26. Having just looked back at three of my favourite recent puzzles that included clashes (gold medal winners, are you being served?, cluedo), it appears that specifying the number of clashes is more common than I recalled. Fair enough.

27. I couldn’t agree more with cruciverbophile @24: leave that sort of clueing to the Guardian daily. Just once in the Inquisitor have I seen something like the wordplay leading to “drawback” which then had to be entered as WARD.

    Kippax @26: I think that using “several” rather than a specific number is often justified when being told the number would remove (part of) a layer of the solving process. (For example, if the theme involved the months of the year or the Apostles, then explicit use of “twelve” might help too much.) Here, having discovered one or two PK’s, had I been told that there were exactly 3 to be found in the puzzle then that would have alerted me very quickly to the theme.

28. HolyGhost @27
    Your response to Kippax reinforces and expands on your response to my own earlier point.
    A minor point to make now is that we were not told there were ‘several’ clashes – only ‘where clashes occur’. That stll means, of course, that there was more than one clash and potentially a great many.
    I have to agree with your general point that being given a bit of specific information that is strictly unnecessary can potentially give the game away. I can tell you, though, that being told there were three clashes in this puzzle (but not being told they are the same letter-pair) would have advanced me not a jot – it would have just made my solving experience in the earlier stages a bit less disconcerting.
    I would just like to re-state how much I enjoyed this puzzle, which is yet another that shows how much skill, imagination and originality goes into them. Thanks to all contributors on this longer-than-usual blog.

29. My concern with the use of ‘several’ was not to do with identifying, or not, the number of clashes, but that it wasn’t clear, even when we had the two place names and knew there were only three clashes, that there weren’t other ‘items’ still to find. I had a nagging feeling that there might be a further twist hidden in there somewhere.

30. I felt like O’Patrick @29: the number of clashes is unambiguous once the clues have been solved.  It is the instruction to identify an unspecified number of items in the grid .  How does one know when to stop looking?  For example HOLE appears in the grid and there are many “holes” on the map too (a limestone region after all). I was left with the feeling that I might have finished rather than knowing I had finished.

31. A letter post, but just to add my appreciation for this puzzle to Terrier’s and others. I loved it, and once I got Settle early on I got a map out and spent a happy time finding Dent and gradually realising the connection between the Ms and the greyed out R – wonderful! I didn’t identify Batty Moss, though I finished the grid, but am happy to learn about it – thank you Pointer!

32. Should have been “late post” not “letter”, sorry…

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