Year: 2017
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Wales Coast Path, day 68: Tudweiliog to Nefyn
Bus journeys to the start of walks are always welcome. Today we’re off, the five of us, to Tudweiliog with Bysus Nefyn. Strangely, the bus visits Nefyn, our final destination, before rattling along to Tudweiliog, but otherwise doesn’t deviate from the road to reach remote villages on either side (there aren’t many of them), so…
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Wales Coast Path, day 67: Porthor to Tudweiliog
Finding the way to Tywyn in our two cars isn’t easy. Turning off the road to Tudweiliog we miss a minor road to the right. We realise the mistake and trying to correct it, but go wrong again and end up on a narrow farm track behind an alarmed family of ducks. Retracing our steps,…
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Wales Coast Path, day 66: Aberdaron to Porthor
We’ve stayed in cottages, houses and old chapels in previous walking weeks, but never in a penthouse. But here we are, in The Penthouse, in a building that’s part of the sea front at Pwllheli. It’s a replacement for the old West End Hotel, built by Solomon Andrews, the original developer of the grand seafront…
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Remembering Walter Conway
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been in and around Tredegar – Tredegar as it is today, but mostly Tredegar as it was in the first part of the twentieth century. Most people know about the town’s best known resident, Aneurin Bevan, and many know about Bevan’s pre-War experience of the pioneering services run…
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Henry Holiday’s Boojum
Martin Gardner, in his annotated edition of Lewis Carroll’s comic poem The hunting of the Snark, includes all of the wood engraved illustrations made by Henry Holiday for the first edition in 1876. He also reproduces a drawing Holiday made for the book, but which never appeared – a picture of the Boojum, which makes…
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What if it’s true?
The Baptists of Mumbles have a way with words. Outside their chapel, on the corner of Langland Road, a glass-fronted box attached to two buttresses contains a large poster. The posters, which change every three or four weeks, have become famous, in the pages of the South Wales Evening Post if not beyond, for their…
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Nicholas Roerich: archaeology and ‘The Rite of Spring’
The BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s concert on Friday in the Brangwyn Hall had a well-matched programme: Stravinsky’s The rite of spring, preceded by Prokofiev’s Scythian suite and Ravel’s piano concerto in G major. All are brilliant works, written within twenty years of one another, and all feature the strongest of rhythms and cross-rhythms. Prokofiev…
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R. M. Lockley, coastwalking pioneer
Preparing for a talk about coastwalking in Plas Brondanw in a week or two I’ve been thinking about the origins of the practice of walking around the coast of a country, and specifically Wales. When, I wondered, did coastwalking start to become a conscious mode of walking for travellers and tourists? Rebecca Solnit, in her…
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Broke down engine blues
The story that follows isn’t unusual, or dramatic, or life-changing. But it says something about the country we now live in, and what an historically abnormal attitude we have towards it. I needed to go to London for the day for a meeting. The train left Swansea on time at 8:29am, and most of the…
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Staples RIP
Glancing across Parc Tawe after finishing the food shopping the other day I saw a shocking sight. Staples was no longer there. It took a while for the eye to confirm that it really had disappeared, and a while longer for the brain to absorb the meaning of the disappearance. The truth was that some…