travel
Wales Coast Path, day 52: Llanrhystud to Aberaeron
In the early morning sun the T1 bus bowls down from Aberystwyth to Llanrhystud. We thank the National Assembly twice over: for our free bus passes, and for the campaign by Elin Jones AM to replace the bus routes suddenly abandoned by the wicked Arriva. The coast road has ruined the centre of Llanrhystud, but […]
Wales Coast Path, day 50: New Quay from Aberaeron
Mid-September and the last of the summer is holding its breath. It brings blue skies, a fine breeze, a languid sea, and a kindly sun that warms the skin without burning it. I’m back with C. for three more days of gentle coastwalking in mid-Ceredigion. For no good reason we start walking from north to […]
Unreal City
The City of London, the ‘square mile’, must count as one of the strangest places on earth. During the week thousands of workers stream into it every morning over London Bridge – ‘… so many, I had not thought death had undone so many’, says the Dantean voice of The Waste Land – to apply […]
Wales Coast Path, day 12: Port Talbot to Swansea
It’s a warm midsummer morning and we’re back, the same quartet, in the centre of Port Talbot. By coincidence Radio 4 is broadcasting a programme called Playing the skyline in which the musicians Kizzy Crawford and Gwilym Simcock are taken on a boat to study the profile of Port Talbot from the sea and then […]
Wales Coast Path, day 1: Chepstow from Caldicot
A day of dogs and bridges. Dogs first. We start from the railway station at Caldicot, three of us this time. The path to the motorway and across to the coastline is studded with notices, official and handwritten, about the absolute unacceptability of dog shit. We try to construct a history that accounts for this […]
Wales Coast Path, day 2: Caldicot from Goldcliff
Like many coastal settlements on the Bristol Channel Goldcliff still remembers the disastrous year 1607. Behind the Farmers Arms in St Mary Magdelene’s Church – a shady avenue of limes leads to its porch – a brass inscription, now about three feet above ground level, reads (the dates refer to the old Julian calendar) as […]
Wales Coast Path, day 3: Goldcliff from Newport
We surprise J. by arriving early, for the first time ever. We’re at Lighthouse Road, Duffryn for a walk round the industrial underbelly of Newport and on into the Caldicot Levels. It’s a cloudy day, but warm, with the promise of faint sun later. The river Usk cuts a wide gash through the city, in […]
Coffee, public and private
Treorci is still a real town. It sits far enough up the Rhondda Fawr and has a big enough hinterland to support a good array of shops, mostly independent, and a lively civic life. The best way of approaching it is on the road from Ogmore Vale. The other day we drove down from Bwlch […]
In search of a younger self: John Clare and me
Thursday afternoon I’m in a café in Market Deeping, just north of Stamford, Lincolnshire. I buy a coffee and then pull out from my wallet two miniature black and white photographs from the early 1950s. They show a house that still stands, I think, somewhere in the village. One shows part of the frontage, the […]
Wales Coast Path, day 49: Llangrannog to New Quay
We’re back in Llangrannog, at an early hour, for a longish walk north to New Quay. It’s a cooler, cloudier morning, for which we’re thankful. From the beach the path climbs up, past Carreg Bica, a ‘great lump of freestanding Ordovician rock’, in Gerald Morgan’s words. Bica was a giant afflicted by toothache; in the […]