Dave Hennings’ crossword database tells me that this will be Agricola’s eleventh crossword, six in the Listener series and four Magpies.
I could almost hear the whoop of joy from the other half of the Dash blogging team when he downloaded ‘Head of Steam’ and at once knew that the theme was the same as his current Vagans in the Magpie. Chalicea by sheer coincidence used the same device as Vagans back in the day to depict the ‘Rocket’ – see ‘Severe Reprimand’ in Crossword in 2018! – while Phi’s Inquisitor out on the same date as this Listener takes a similar approach to Agricola with clashes marking locations and words marking the route. All in all an irresistible theme!
With a pretty good idea of what that was, so generously spelled out in the title, we had a prompt about what those sets of two letters in a cell, ‘each group representing a thematic location’ were going to give us, and “t’cylinder to look strange then” gave STOCKTON and DARLINGTON with a slightly less known ETHERLEY (half of Dash needed Google to confirm that).
After Sabre and ‘Eck, it was a relief to have relatively gentle clues like ‘Apprentices take hold of a group (6)’ CLUTCH with Apprentices giving us an extra A. It was soon clear that we were to enter DATE OF FIRST JOURNEY below the grid and, of course, the media are giving us plenty of railway publicity today, so we must write 27th September 1825 there.
What a lovely find Agricola! CUMMINGTONITE, to give us six of those cells with two letters for the IN GT ON of Darlington! We knew where we had to look as ETHEROMANIAC had placed the ETHERLEY Incline, and PROCONSULAR the OC and ON of Stockton.
So what was left to do? Find a roughly geographic route of ten and six cells spelling two relevant names. GEORGE leapt out so, naturally we hunted for Stephenson – but it was not to be. After a bit of head-scratching, we opted for LOCOMOTION. Thank you Agricola, a fine commemoration of the event.
The Oenophile elite? I think we have to be satisfied with that barley and the meadow being saved for it at 12ac. We can raise a single malt to that!
Vagans adds a railway note: It was especially good that all three puzzles could be published to mark the 200th anniversary of the historic opening run of Locomotion no 1 (then called “Active”) on the Stockton and Darlington Railway – the first open-to-all-for-a-fee passenger rail service in the world. I started off with the same clashes for places -and-word-for-route idea and am glad now that I took a different tack. It would be invidious to compare but it was interesting to see both Phi and Agricola rising to the challenge of some very clever clashes to build the names of the key places and also the difficulty of achieving something like geographical accuracy at the same time. If you’d like to enjoy a beautiful book of history and photos of the line don’t miss “The Stockton & Darlington Railway 1825-2025. Illustrated limited edition” hardback coffee table book: £35.00 from https://www.sdr1825.org.uk/product/stockton-darlington-railway-book/ – cheaper elsewhere but good IMHO to let the Friends get the full value.
