EV1648
Westward Ho by Chalicea
Setter’s Blog
Messages generated are LINK THE TWO PLACES and SHADE THE ENGINEER. John RENNIE engineered the AVON and KENNET CANAL linking BRISTOL and READING.
Setter’s Blog
The Listener Setters’ dinner was in Bristol last year and we spent some time admiring Bristol’s wealth of ships, railway construction, canals, and historical engineering feats in general. I have set crosswords on Brunel’s engineering masterpieces in the past but Rennie was relatively new to me. My husband lived in Newbury as a child and introduced me to the Kennet and Avon Canal.
Wikipedia tells us all about it:
The Kennet and Avon Canal is a waterway in southern England with an overall length of 87 miles (140 km) made up of two lengths of navigable river linked by a canal. The name is used to refer to the entire length of the navigation rather than solely to the central canal section. From Bristol to Bath the waterway follows the natural course of the River Avon before the canal links it to the River Kennet at Newbury, and from there to Reading on the River Thames. In all, the waterway incorporates 105 locks.
The map of the route of the rivers and the canal with its 105 locks gave me a fine graphical route of the waterways to fit between the names of the cities, which conveniently both have seven letters, so that I could construct a symmetrical grid with RENNIE conveniently appearing at the heart of his CANAL.
It was important to see that solvers had spotted the theme and I opted for one of the easiest devices – extra words to be extracted from the clues. It didn’t take many, using their first and last letters, to spell out LINK THE TWO PLACES and SHADE THE ENGINEER.
The title was originally ‘Dig It”, but only the canal part was dug, the rivers were probably simply dredged, so I ultimately opted for the mildly deceptive ‘Westward Ho’ the title of Charles Kingsley’s rather gloomy historical novel. I shouldn’t think solvers were misled for long.
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A full review of this puzzle can be seen over on fifteensquared.