When I’ve been to the Lake District before, I’ve mainly explored the Northern Lakes region around Derwent Water, Ullswater and Buttermere, and my only blog about the other end of the National Park until now has been a slightly tongue-in-cheek dig at Windermere’s comparative privatisation. But that was based on […]
When I was nine or ten the family toured the wild, remote Atlantic west coast of Ireland, from Cork to Kerry and the far western point of Europe on the Dingle Peninsula. I had vague memories and a grainy scan of a print of an outlandish road winding down steep […]
Where’s the working railway on the Isle of Skye? The railway doesn’t go to the Isle of Skye, right? It ends at the pier at Kyle of Lochalsh, or else at the harbour at Mallaig, where boats take you over the sea to Skye. But there is a railway on […]
On a small wooded peninsula where there estuaries of the Dwyryd and Glaslyn meet at Penrhyndeudraeth south of Porthmadog in the foothills of Snowdonia in the kingdom of Gwynedd, you can find the Uncanny Valley. Portmeirion: the construction that looks just close enough to being a village as to be […]
There aren’t many more stunning parts of the country than Torridon in Wester Ross on the coast of the Northwest Highlands. The steeply enclosed Glen Torridon, with its mountain river tumbling down from the Coulin Estate, and its mirror lochans like Lochan an Iasgair. Opening out to the sea loch, […]
I’m not sure why it has taken so long to do a post for Stourhead, the impressive landscape gardens at the source of the River Stour in south west Wiltshire. I guess I was taken there so many times as a child that I’ve managed to avoid going back too […]
From where it flows into the Tweed at Innerleithin, a solitary road runs up alongside the Leithen Water — Abhainn Leitheinn, the grey river — and is soon enclosed in perfect round and green hills. It twists and turns and climbs northwards through these, the Moorfoot Hills, treading a path […]
Windermere is famous as the largest of The Lakes in the English Lake District, and in England generally. Its also famously a beautiful place, flanked by the high fells of Langdale and pretty villages like Ambleside, celebrated in verse and on canvas by the romantics, and loved by the millions […]
In the summer I spent a few evenings and early mornings shooting the hills surrounding the valley of the River Stour — the Blackmore Vale — in North Dorset and South Somerset. For much of the year, the clay and low limestone ridges of Thomas Hardy’s vale of little dairies […]
In February 2010 I booked the train up to Penrith… only to break the bicycle I’d planned to take on the day before departure…. so changed plans and walked everywhere in the snow around Keswick and Derwent Water, where the boat bus company fought to break the ice… up over […]
