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.... sorry, .... + "about" + "before Christ".

Oh for goodness sake! I can confirm I was indeed being a div. Can't be ar5ed with the algebra, as someone else said I don't do numbers, the grid is filled so I'm happy, thanks for getting me over the top

Fair enough in the end I thought. The initially daunting preamble fell out OK as the puzzle was worked through. Had a few loose ends in parsing but they've been picked up by others earlier in the thread.

Suffers from the same structural flaw as many of this type of endgame in that I finished the puzzle without solving a good few clues, but other than that pretty good.

Ptobes. The end game is worth the effort. Although there are numbers involved the mathematical knowledge needed (to work out a) is pretty rudimentary.

Phew - some hard work getting to the final step but I'm there! :)

One question... when the preamble says 'what do to with the rest of the grid', does it mean the 'main grid' as mentioned earlier in the preamble, or does it include the external cells? I think that's the only bit of clarity missing from the crossword.

Consensus seems to be main grid only as you need the external cells to display the full definition.

As it's a wet day and I had nothing better to do, I took another look. After much googling, I found the definition and hence the missing two words - which I then located in the grid. No maffs involved. I can take a guess at the second instruction for the rest of the grid. Not my favourite puzzle by a country mile - but at least it's done.

Hello all. Have got the grid , the messages the values et al but I can't make it land on the final cell ( I can only hit the penultimate cell) Is the last word of the instruction jumbled? Also don't we need two cells in the extra row and column (one from each) to complete the definition? So very close....

mullingar

You need to find twelve cells but there are thirteen numbers. Think about what that has to mean - if you have twelve fences to put together, how many fenceposts do you need?

This puzzle has received mixed reviews but I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had multiple PDMs during a steady solve and everything worked out very nicely in the end. Thank you very much, Gnomish!

On a related topic, I called the Times yesterday to cancel my online subscription and learned that there is a new subscription option costing £5 per month that gives access to all of the crosswords plus a limited number of articles. This might be of interest to others on this forum.