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Lumen re 5, if you have the entry, you can add a letter to form a scottish word meaning somehow. I drew it from the dark recesses of my mind because I think there has been a listener with the same answer/entry combo. (i think it must have been fairly recent as only been doing them for 2-3 years).

Although I do think it's pretty tough to clue using a word people likely wont know, and where the wordplay can give lots of possibilities.

Lordbadger - ah I see now, thanks!

Thanks Andy and Lordbadger. I’d actually got both over an inspirational cup of tea in bed!

Apart from 20ac, the coding looks hard, any tips on how to approach it eg SW four letter entry?

Dylan - I got the 5th row word after 20ac… the repeated letter from 20ac appears often including last letter. Then 1ac

Dylan, once I realised what the long word in Row 6 I did a search in my Chambers CD-ROM for similar items. If you're using the app you'll need WordWeb installed (I don't have it). Then aren't many results. It was a case of matching these by word length and, as Merenz says, to the occurrences of the repeated letter from Row 6.

The main obstacle of course that several of the entries crossing the thematic entries in the first two rows are jumbled. I ended up entering both the coded and jumbled entries one letter at a time - there is a logical route - though others may have found an easier way. That's why I found the final stages a slog, but I think I'm in the minority with this opinion!

Do the omissions from the down clues have any relevant bearing on the six across answers or is it just that they're linguistically related?

Thanks Merenz. I now have a good candidate for the row above 20ac,but it gives nonsense for the four letter one in the bottom row?

Dsc - I can't see any connection other than the obvious linguistic one.

Hi Dylan. There are no shared letters between row 5 and the little one at the bottom. The coding only goes one way. I.e. if eg A encodes to B it doesn’t follow that B encodes to A.

Found this a real curate's egg (no thematic pun intended) in that I really enjoyed solving the ingenious missing letter down clues but really didn't enjoy cracking the cipher so am in agreement with Loge on this one overall.