Saw connections couldn't get groups😀 Also saw red herring of meat backwards

Clever and very tough. Good use of red herrings donne (poet) and the stick words. A couple of my wrong answers were accepted so you may have left a comma at the end of the acceptable answer word stems. Well done.

bit puzzled as - in desperation - I put rivers for the last line and it said correct! can anyone explain? I liked this though.

Pammy- see my comment below. If the setter ends the list of acceptable answers ( which the solver doesn't see) with a comma then any answer even a blank answer is treated as correct because a comma effectively means "or". Hope that explains what happened.

Brilliant red herrings and fiendish countries, good fun!

Outstanding grid Oli. One of the best that i've seen.