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All solved, albeit with a pretty crude shape inside the blue, but have failed so far to parse the back end of 19d, which I take to be an anagram of spire + missing letter 'o', to mean tender.

pka1 - Adult (A) pi confusion in printing inside 'sore' (tender) ...'o' is extra

Thanks Crates, I couldn't see past 'confusion' being an anagrind.

Thanks all, have it now.

I agree about the crudeness. This was what I meant with my comment that perhaps Ptolemy drew the map. The defects are more than simply what might be expected due to the limitations of the medium.

If you take the north sides of cells 16 & 17, that represents 130km, 65km per cell. The remainder of the row, 9 cells, represents 150km, 17km per cell.

Another serious flaw : if you assume that the last letter of 15 represents a well known easterly point to the SE of the northern capital, then the 3 unerased letters of 19D should be erased. Nowhere in the south comes within 32km of the easterly extent of the point in the north.

If you're going to attempt to represent a map, surely you should pay attention to these 'details' ?

Can I have the last letter of 12 across please? Complete in every other regard and I clearly have a mental block on this!

Deulc - tackle is gear, spare letter is A giving last letter is G.

It’s a G. The wordplay is a four-letter word for “tackle” as a noun (as in “fishing tackle”, for example), plus A for “active”, with the Extra letter being an E.

Sorry, as smartie correctly notes, the extra letter is the A from GEAR. The answer is an obscure plural (I think it’s an Arabic plural form) ofvthe word “erg”, meaning a shifting sand dune.

Pretty sure the spare letter is an A - ar(a)eg.