• The other day, as I was coming home from an evening walk, a strange thing happened.  I was nearing a place where the road narrows and the pavement gives out and you need to take care before crossing to the…

  • The Auguste Rodin exhibition now at Tate Modern takes you beyond easy assumptions about the artist, based on the best-known works and a few fragments of biography.  Rodin’s escape from the conventional beauties of classicism into reconstructing real human bodies…

  • At the centre of Penderyn is the Lamb Inn, with its blue plaque commemorating ‘Lewsyn yr Heliwr’, one of the leaders of the 1831 Merthyr Rising.  Almost opposite, there’s an ancient signpost labelled ‘Cwm Cadlan, Brecon County’.  It points to…

  • If you move to live on the coast it doesn’t take long to discover that your world, enriched as it might be by the presence of the sea, has been reduced.  You can no longer travel in all directions, but…

  • This small corner of Carmarthenshire is new to me – the point where the Cothi flows into the Tywi, just west of Llanegwad.  A track leaves the village, passes a cottage, Penygoilan, and a farm, Llwchgwyn, and then turns into…

  • Yma ar y groesffordd yn y bryniau, ymddengys fod pob peth yn bosib.  Gallwch chi gymryd unrhyw ffordd o’ch dewis: nôl i Bontlliw, ymlaen i Felindre, i’r gorllewin i Bontarddulais, dros y mynydd i Garnswllt yn Sir Gâr, neu lawr…

  • In summer 1972 I made two happy discoveries within the Roman fortress that had occupied the centre of Exeter.  One of them was human.  That encounter changed my life for good.  The other was inanimate.  Its impact on me wasn’t…

  • Roedd yr haul yn dechrau disgyn wrth imi gychwyn, ar ôl swper, o hen dafarn Y Groes.  Cerddais ar hyd y lôn sy’n troelli ar draws gwastadeddau Dyffryn Conwy tuag at bentref Rowen.  Cymylau sirws uchel yn unig yn yr…

  • Walter was already an old-fashioned forename in 1952, when my parents donated it to me.  To be fair, they were anxious about the commonness of my surname, and eager to load me with as many other names as they could,…

  • When I consider how the government of our country – I mean the one with the satirical name ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ –  has fallen under the control of a set of unscrupulous and heartless gangsters,…

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