THE winner of The Northern Echo's Champagne Christmas Crossword is a 44-year-old teacher from North Yorkshire.

Linton Austen, who lives in Thirsk, was the lucky person who had his correct and fully completed entry drawn out of a hat which contained nearly 100 entries.

"Really?" he said in amazement when told he had won the magnum of champagne. "That's wonderful."

With more than 800 clues, The Northern Echo's Christmas Crossword is believed to be the biggest crossword ever published in a newspaper.

Of those clues, Linton said that he found 138 across the hardest. The answer was six letters long and the clue read: "A frenzied woman; a follower of Bacchus."

"I had to phone a friend in York for that one," he said. "I had been on the Internet looking for it but I couldn't find it anywhere, but five minutes after I'd rung him he called back and said the answer was 'maenad'."

Bacchus was the Roman god of wine, and a maenad was one of his female followers who drank herself into a frenzy.

Linton, who was helped in his mammoth task by his partner Karen Andrews, regularly does the weekly prize crossword in The Northern Echo and other crosswords in his local papers. He recently won £10 from one of them, and has won a pen in The Northern Echo's Saturday crossword.

Originally from Folkstone, in Kent, Linton is a science teacher at Breckenborough School, Thirsk. It is a residential school, run by a Quaker trust, for emotionally and behaviourally disturbed eight to 16-year-olds with above average learning abilities, but who have been excluded from schools across the country.

The Northern Echo's giant Christmas crossword is now into its third decade. Our original compiler retired two years ago and last year, when we published a crossword with only 440 clues, we were inundated with complaints.

For Christmas 2000, we scoured the country to find a compiler who could manage more than 800 clues and, given the fantastic response, we very much hope that he will agree to do another one for Christmas 2001