gwallter

  • There were two other people, a man and his wife from Caerffili, at St Mary’s church when I visited Capel-y-ffin last week.  They stood and shared my wonder at the wonky beauty of the tiny building, with its wooden bellcote,…

  • On 12 December 1775 Gilbert White, the naturalist of Selborne in Hampshire, wrote a letter to his friend Daines Barrington in which he recalled a remarkable character who had lived in the village ‘more than twenty years ago’.  He doesn’t…

  • I’ve written before about Francis Place, late seventeenth century artist and potter, and about Coxwold in north Yorkshire.  This piece brings the two together. Place was a landscapist ahead of his time, in vision (he anticipated the watercolour painters of…

  • The three of us were talking, as we strolled along the front at Porthcawl the other day, about modern icons.  J. had just been for a return visit to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, so the Angel of the North in Gateshead soon came…

  • Beth yw rhodd neu anrheg?  Gwrthrych neu wasanaeth y mae person yn ei gynnig i rywun arall, heb dâl.  Nid yn unig heb dâl, ond hefyd heb ddisgwyl tâl neu gymwynas yn y dyfodol.  Beth yw anrheg, gan unigolyn neu…

  • The National Gallery is celebrating its 200th birthday with a very special exhibition.  Surprisingly, it’s the first show it’s every mounted devoted to the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh.  To be able to look at them intently and quietly, in…

  • It’s a question that wouldn’t have been asked, let alone answered, before Rebecca Solnit’s pioneering book Wanderlust, published in 2000.  Solnit is a writer probably best known for her books on women – she was the first to formulate the…

  • Cysur mawr, yn y cyfnod hwn o boen a galar, yw ymweld â Glenys yn ei thŷ yn y Mwmbwls â’i olwg digymar dros Fae Abertawe.  Dyma ni’n dau’n cerdded lawr ’na amser coffi.  Rownd bloc y teras, tu heibio…

  • Most visitors to Syracuse stick to Ortygia, the tear-shaped island that was the original site of the Greek colony, and Neapolis, with its large Greek theatre and sculptured caves.  The Basilica di Santa Lucia is slightly off the beaten track,…

  • 1   Man on a mountain Caspar David Friedrich painted the work usually called The wanderer above the sea of fog in 1818.  Though it found little fame at the time, it’s long been seen as the quintessence of German Romanticism…

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