This is Mountain Ledges second crossword. I am mystified by the title. Are we in for some kind of scrum?
The first device ‘The letters halfway from the misprints to their corrections … spell out a thematic region and its description.’ meant that in 20 of the 48 clues we were hunting for misprints, then having to perform the rather fiddly task of working out the letter that was identifying the region. I wonder why Mountain Ledges included this original device. Was it thematic in some way (finding a mid-point compromise?) or just to add difficulty or delay our penny-drop moment? There were some fairly tough clues and I needed to back-solve from the clue ‘Boy’s traps are banned by northern state’ – giving KEPS (SPEAK reversed minus A(re) with a B to H misprint correction) to work out that we needed a T here for TERRA NULLIUS so we must be changing Boy’s to Hoy’s giving us a Scottish indicator. BIR TAWIL appeared a litte more easily – fortunately, as this was a fairly obscure theme.
Of course, as the grid filled, EGYPT and SUDAN appeared placed nicely symmetrically in their appropriate areas and that rendered the second device (spotting those clashes and drawing appropriate lines) a little less difficult. ‘In seven cells, normally-clued across and down answers clash and the letters must be replaced with a dot.
The clashing letters (across then down in each pair) read row by row, should then spell out an associated thematic region (the cause of a disagreement). I wonder how many other solvers struggled to solve 4 across ‘Flowers in large part of scent producer’ (giving the USK and PO in MUCH = MUSK POUCH) so that it took a while to spot HALAIB TRIANGLE. I guess I wasn’t the only solver who needed the help of co-solver Wiki to understand the theme. And were my lines the correct and only ones needed to delineate those two areas that neither Egypt, nor Sudan is too keen to occupy?
With the help of Wiki, it became clear that those two regions are disputed by Egypt and Sudan and it was not too difficult to see how we could join the dots to illustrate them (once we had realised that both regions had to be shown), though we wonder if there is some ambiguity in the solution. The left-most angled line would seem to meet the criteria if it runs down either from the left-most dot or the one further in. We were undecided about that, but did decide that the line running down from the top right corner connected with a slight dog-leg to the one down to the L of LUNATIC, making two lines not one, so one was not drawn down through AMASS in the right hand column.
Thank you Mountain Ledges. Solvers often say that they learn something new when managing a Listener. I certainly did here.