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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Llygad crwtyn, llygad dyn: David Jones yn Rhos
Dair wythnos yn ôl cerddais i heibio i gapel bychan S. Trillo yn Llandrillo-yn-Rhos, heb sylweddoli mai’r llecyn hwn oedd y cyflwyniad cyntaf i Gymru i’r bardd a’r artist David Jones. Daw’r wybodaeth hon mewn llyfr mawr newydd gan Thomas…