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CD, I have decided to stick with the earlier (alphabetical) letter, otherwise the river is not contiguous - but I retain the right to be paranoid for around 13 days or so.

The earlier letter has to be right Gitto, no doubt about it. We are told to add another C. The later letter would not fit the bill. I was initially confused as I didn't see how this presented a solution fit for a king or queen. The chess explanation closes down that issue and the whole thing hangs together fine.

To be more explicit than in my post #61, the two new words created by the (correctly) changed letter are both types of coins. That's why they might fit a king or queen.

I am still unhappy about the colour issue. And would I be okay not colouring the majority portions, arguing it was coloured white.

I am struggling to understand what is meant by the first two words of the D instruction. My OED is quite old and does not give the first word. Google has not helped either, but I think the word might mean nothing more complicated than "identical". If this is correct, I have found 7 identical letters which fit with 15 across, but this does not help with the river, so I have not coloured it. If I try to colour it, there are several alternative routes it could take, unless I am missing some subtle part of the D instruction, which is entirely possible. Others seem to have coloured the river, so I am guessing that they have gleaned more from the D instruction than I have. Any hints would be appreciated.

maybe candlestick but if you colour it you take that risk away

OptO - if you google the first word + wolfram you should get a good explanation.

If you change the first word to the equivalent noun (replace the ic with a y) and google it with 'Wikimedia alphabet' you should get what you are looking for.

My FINAL input to the colour conundrum is a follows

Before the letter change the cell is part of the river, if you change the letter, but not the colour you can still see the river, so there cannot be a bridge there. So I have change the letter and the colour........but I may have fallen into a hare hole!!

Ma heid’s birlin’. After filling the grid and deriving ABCD, I came to a halt. A and 15a gave familiar ground but I had no idea what the first two words of D meant. Google led me into material that went over my head, so I put the puzzle aside. A chance find (which is mentioned in post 77) gave me a possible key which worked - although I still don’t understand it at all.

As to “Royal”, I prefer the chess theory over the coin idea. One of the coins wouldn’t bear a Royal head (although that may change come November….). The chess theory also explains why the new thing works diagonally while the others are perpendicular; only the King and Queen can move both ways.

I think I may just have grasped the full import of the first two words of D. The sets are Closed Loop, 2 Closed Loops and No Loops. Is that it, or am I going down another rabbit hole?