My first thought, the recursive error is because this function is already called permutations. And then you import another function called permutations. So, no.

Well, what can I say... today I found out that flags in the discussion of solutions are not useless (and yes, I've been here for a year) :)

No, the posts here can be seen from the homepage discourse.

a comment like this merits the spoiler flag

Use print(strng) to see for which input your function fails.

In this case, print('"' + strng + '"') would make your mistake a bit more obvious.

OP solved it, closing

it seems like you are reasoning in 1 dimension; you treat East and North as the same, and South and West as the same. the kata requires you to reason in 2 dimensions.

• you are asking for help: this is a question, not an issue with the kata
• you should post your entire code, within markdown code blocks

That's a problem with your code, not a kata issue.