i Cryptic Crossword 4179 Eccles
June 28, 2024
Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳
All over in a flash, this very enjoyable crossword was a delight to solve. Nothing too tricky, but all beautifully and carefully assembled. There’s no questionable definitions and no controversial word- play. Just a good, straightforward cryptic. I found the SE corner a little trickier than the rest, but only a very little. My last in was the compiler of religious scripts, and before that the opposed to, where it took me a little longer than it should have done to get the word-play.
One of those puzzles that demonstrates that it doesn’t have to be tough to be good.
I thought the horse race at 1ac was excellent, but my Clue of the Day is 21ac, which is very pleasingly done: “A nastier criminal? Well, sort of (8)”.
Here’s the link for the answers and explanations: https://www.fifteensquared.net/2020/08/05/independent-10550-eccles/
Borodin
batarde
Saboteur
Denzo
flashling
jonofwales
Cornick
sprouthater
uiytjhgmj
willow1235
idothei 
Yes, a great puzzle taking me a little over ⏳, but nowhere near two. Liked the CoD and too many others to mention. DNK BIG DIPPER in this sense which went in from wordplay and crossers. The 5-2-5 horse race went in immediately; I didn’t see why but couldn’t resist the lovely starters for s.o many down clues. Fortunately, I remembered to return before finishing, so saw the cunning wordplay for a PDM without 225.
Much more like it today! Very quick to solve, but lots of smiles along the way. Difficult to choose between POINT TO POINT and ARTESIAN for my favourite. Also liked PLUMMET and ATTEND.
Like the Bargee I couldn’t decide between those two for my favourite. ‘Eton broken up’ is such clever wordplay, and then ‘Well, sort of’ is such a delightful definition…
Yes to the difficulty rating except for my LOI the containment of TURGI[d] in LIST where I thought the IST was from LIST and ‘interminable’ was deletion at both ends, then couldn’t see the answer.
The NW corner held on for a while – I kept thinking of the wrong type of music for 7d – but the rest went in fairly steadily. Almost into three egg-timers here, so I suspect I will have found it more difficult than most, but Eccles is one of those setters I’ve never found it easy to get to grips with.
easy-ish for an Eccles, had to tease out the wordplay in a lot of clues but only failed to parse 1a – something to do with pinto, but that would have horse race as definition & part of wordplay, so just put point-to-point in
Maybe ⌛⌛ here – I had a rare day in the office, and wasn’t *quite* able to finish this over the breakfast table before going in. Like JoW, it was the NW sector that held it up (I couldn’t parse UNIT TRUST) so had to come back to it mid-afternoon.
It was the NE corner that held me up for a while. I kept thinking of ‘outrages’ for 5dn but it didn’t seem right; eventually the penny dropped that it was an anagram of ‘course’ and ‘it’ after which the rest flowed in. So more like ⌛⌛ here. ARTESIAN was my favourite.
We needed 225 to finally understand the brilliance of 1a. That along with 21a great choices for COD, though I rather liked 11a.
We finished in around 2 timers- still getting back into the crossword mindset probably as we made hard work of some very straightforward clues! With Eccles it is often that we can see how it is to be done, but we can’t actually find the right bits! 16d was a classic example of knowing how the puzzle worked – even to deciding the beginning was the Li of list but “turgid” eluded us! It was also our LOI. A fun puzzle and all parsed clearly apart from 1a which was extremely clever once you know!!