pumpkinstrokemarrow

A picture of just the box on this occasion, the snaps including the completed puzzle not being very good. Pity the ancient Nokia can't deal with reflection from the puzzle surface.

Another first, this puzzle being the first from 'jr' puzzles, printed in Stockport and labelled in English, French and what looks like Spanish, although the word given for puzzle is the intriguing looking 'palapeli-pussel'. Which Mr. Google suggests might be Finnish. He also comes up with a computer game called Palapeli - so, sadly, someone has already had my idea of putting a jigsaw onto the little screen. But now that someone else has done it, I wonder how much like the real thing it would be? There would be lots of pluses, one could, for example, make more or less any image one wanted into a jigsaw (although such making would take no account of the image, it would just cut according to some stored pattern). I suppose the relationship would be something like that between the kindle and a real book, with the kindle being useful but not being the real thing - although I suppose that eventually the world will be full of people who never knew the real thing and so would not miss it. Would find the real thing smelly and clumsy - thinking here of the very real BH aversion for the smells of second hand book shops.

Back at this puzzle, started in the usual way with the edge, on this occasion completed before moving off elsewhere.

Then the skyline, then the roofs and the half-timbering. Found pushing down onto the walls hard, so went for the line across the lower part of the image: the top of the weir, the path and the railings. This went OK, then pushed down from there to complete the weir and its surrounds.

The the treeline, then pushed up from there to complete the buildings. Then down to do the three islands of tree that this left.

Then the three islands of sky which completed the puzzle. For the sky, I resorted to sorting the pieces by prong configuration.

A fairly regular puzzle, with most pieces much the same size and with four pieces meeting at interior vertices most of the time.

A successful puzzle, not visited by smells of tobacco, mistakes or panics about missing pieces.

But what sort of a castle was it? Were the half timbered bits planted on what was left of a proper castle? Was the whole thing the fantasy of some inbred princeling (the sort of chap who would try to marry into a proper monarchy)? Hiring village girls to let their hair down from tower windows and generally play at dungeons and dragons? Unfortunately, Mr. Google is far more knowledgeable about jigsaw puzzles of the castle than he is about the castle itself. Surely the place was not knocked up just to serve the jigsaw, calendar and chocolate box industries?