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If you Google the word and the geographical location all will be revealed, smithsax

You live and learn. I was a feeling a little smug after completing the puzzle so nice to be brought down a peg or two by demonstrating my poor geography.

I wouldn't feel bad about it! It was the final thing about the puzzle that troubled me, and an extremely clever misdirection

James - thanks for trying to help me, but I still can't get it to work. I detest P******* and in the past I have not even bothered to start a Listener if the preamble tells us that such a device is involved. My enjoyment of this puzzle ended when I had solved all the clues. Since then, it has been a dreary slog. Even if I could solve it I would not be voting for it as POTY.

This was a ‘slowly chip away over days’ puzzle for me.
But SO worth persevering with! Extraordinary. The final PDM of the end result relating back to the technique was a delight!
Thank you Shark!

For those of you still working on this, this website is very useful:
www.boxentriq.com

0pt0, I agree - I probably wouldn't have started had I known. The mechanics of it leave me cold. Happy to have done it though.

Opt0

Best advice, completely ignore the thing with all the quotation marks.
You have the names of three 7Dns, which have a historical order of creation. The name of the latest one gives the most likely K_ _ _ _ _ D.

1.Find sites which enable you to encode & decode your three 7 downs.
2.Take away the most likely K_ _ _ _ _ D and attempt the 7 downs in their historical order. V, (B), P
3. Enter the newest 7Dn as a keyword and input your un-numbered letters. If the result is a proper word (Incidentally it's an anagram of a thematically related word) then you are sucking diesel.
4. Move on to the last 7DN (P), enter the same K_ _ _ _ _ D, then the word you found at stage 3 and you should see a word which relates to another of B's spheres of influence.
4. The scale number entered goes into the NW quadrant of a cell.
5. A description of what follows goes at 1 AC

Thanks to your excellent tips, turast, I have limped over the line! I had got as far as the word for "placid" (when decoding) and then simply gave up, not knowing how to proceed. Your thematic anagram tip gave me the sorely needed PDM !! A truly brilliant construction and fascinating puzzle generally speaking, but the preamble was very poorly worded IMHO and seemed to set out to confuse the solver as much as possible ! But am now a happy chappy nevertheless!

I really want to like this one: construction ingenious, but some of the clueing is a bit chewy and the definitions a bit strained for my liking. Shame, because the way we get four successive matches for 1a is so delightful.

Btw, add me to the list of those who guessed the final form, as I couldn’t get the 29ing to work even after finding all the names. However, I persevered, and cracked it in the end, and I’m glad I did because it turned out some of the gibberish I was getting was because I had a wrong entry!

I sympathise with those who do not like 29ing, especially some of the fiddly forms, but in this case I found that Googling for “online X 29er” provided everything needed with a minimum of faff.

I do have a few parsing queries, if anyone can oblige with a nudge. For 8 (“sedative stupor indeed penetrates Jack”), I see the definition, and fragments of the wordplay, but can’t quite put it all together. For 12 (“Rounded division, one sort beyond clod”) I again see the definition but haven’t a clue about the wordplay. For 25, I have most of it, I think, but am struggling to explain the middle two letters from “in preference to”.