or May A Guest Prelate Indicate an Explanation (of how the puzzle came to be)

Vagans regrets to say that the original title of this puzzle was “Baywatch” – not you understand that he has ever watched the series… The preamble then ran as follows:

The bishop’s attention wandered while saying Evensong on holiday to the curvaceous beauties on the other side of the bay. Solvers must differentially highlight four such, each in a continuous curved line (33 cells in all). As the bishop’s eyesight is also failing, however, all bar the first of the across clues has gained an extra letter that must be removed before solving. These letters in clue order spell out a quotation whose missing word is thematic. Etc etc

Unsurprisingly the editors were having none of it, preferring their usual rather Puritanical style and eschewing such unnecessary and space-filling whimsy – but that did also obscure the original genesis of the puzzle, as revealed by the original explanation:

The bishop was saying Evensong in the local cathedral (of course), the bays of whose choir displayed a series of arches one above another rising in style order from NORMAN to EARLY ENGLISH to DECORATED to PERPENDICULAR.

Vagan’s real-life alter ego does as many will know visit cathedrals quite often, bishop that he is, and in a long Psalm or anthem may well find his eyes lifting to the glories of the architecture. And in his home cathedral of Hereford might see a view such as this recorded in The Illustrated London News for 1852. It crossed his mind on one such occasion that the three tiers of arches had been built in the first three of the usually recognised four styles of earlier English architecture: Norman, Early English and Decorated. (Perpendicular can be found elsewhere in the cathedral), and that it might just be possible to stack the names of the styles in the form of their arches in a crossword grid.

Well – just, after a lot of trialling and tweaking and the help of a friend, and the result is as published, after the usual editorial improvements. The Francis Thompson quote is an old friend (bishops do feel like that sometimes) but the Flanagan and Allen’s song which lightened the tone and fitted the theme so well was from the friend. Hopefully you enjoyed it too.

Posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2025 at 3:06 pm under Setting the scene.
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