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Thankyou, I'd googled rbus in the middle, but not brus. Rather annoyingly it is in Chambers, but the online word wizard doesn't recognise it - now for those pesky targets!!

Poat’s last Listener Crossword was the notorious “Buried Treasure” (No 4422, 29 October 2016), where the “treasure” was buried in the text of the preamble rather than the grid. This time, the “treasure” is in plain sight as the answer to clue number 2.

I thought that this would be a nightmare of cold solving, but the obstacle cells emerged quite straightforwardly, so the puzzle wasn’t as difficult as I had feared.

I've solved about 3/4 of the clues, but I still can't write much in. I don't understand the difference between 'reaching an obstacle' and 'making glancing contact with an obstacle'. Surely obstacles are only ever hit from above/below or left/right. 'Glancing' suggests hitting at a 45 degree angle.

Am I at least correct that the 2nd row, and the penultimate row, plus the penultimate column contain no obstacles, and so their entries fill the entire row/column?

Demeter. You are correct with your rows and columns. Glancing refers to hitting a blocker cell at a corner.

Hi, Demeter,

Yes, clue set 11, reading right to left, clue set 25, reading left to right, and clue set 10, reading top to bottom. Also clue set 16, reading bottom to top encounters no obstacles.

Buzzb has provided an illustration of glancing contact in an earlier post. If a corner of an answer is also the corner of an obstacle cell, with the obstacle cell in the adjoining row or column, then the answer does not continue in the same direction but goes off (away from the obstacle cell) at a 90-degre angle. In some clue sets,there are several turns, but every clue set ends at either an obstacle cell or at the edge of the puzzle.

Thanks monkjunk and wintonian.

Sorry, I should have read Buzzb's earlier post. I don't think I would ever have realised that that's what was intended by 'glancing'.

My sympathies to S_Pugh, who must feel that he is trapped in a wheel of recurrence. But at least the objects to be highlighted are within the grid, not elsewhere on the page, nor on another page, nor in another newspaper. Reasons to be cheerful, though the grid search was nevertheless laborious.

Finally finished - like Meursault, finding the targets was time consuming. The final 2 eluded me for quite a while, but all is good now. I think this is a very clever puzzle with an intriguing entry method, and quite a feat of construction. At least he fit the bloody hare in this one, and made use of it!

Gitto - by “made use of it” are you implying that 2d is one of the targets. My reading of “specific kind” in the preamble would exclude it.
Still missing 3 this morning. Will start a new grid and reenter everything carefully in case I have made a mistake.
Am I correct to assume that all extra letters added (apart from those on the perimeter) contribute to a target?

I also excluded another 4 legged potential beginning with D and a two legged potential - 4 letters beginning with P on the basis it not specifically related to the others.