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A cloudy, cool morning, but the beach car park at Llansteffan is already filling with dogs and children and older citizens tying up the laces of their walking books. Flying in the face of commercial self-interest, the Beach Shop and…
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Goya and the Philippines junta: power mocked
The town of Castres has several claims to fame. At its centre handsome rows of old tanners’ and weavers’ houses overhang the river Agout. It was where the socialist leader and peacemaker Jean Jaurès was born in 1859. It has…
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Woad and French museology
Magrin is the name of an ordinary enough village not very far east of Toulouse. Just outside it is a low conical hill. On top of the hill are the ruins of a château, built in the middle ages and…
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Wales Coast Path, day 35: Neyland to Herbranston
On their way home C and H drop me in Neyland, for a solo walk to Herbranston. Neyland’s a modest and workaday town, considering that its effective founder was a megalomaniac. Isambard Kingdom Brunel chose it as the coastal terminal…
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Wales Coast Path, day 36: Herbranston to Dale
After a coffee in the Yacht Club we catch the rackety mid-morning minibus from Dale to Hebranston, two villages and two long creeks away. The few other passengers seem to be fellow-walkers. Our driver’s an abstracted, taciturn man with a…
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Wales Coast Path, day 38: Dale from Marloes
We’re back at Musselwick Sands, this time exposed by the lower tide, and we’re joined by J for the day, on a tour of the Marloes peninsula. Still the cold wind blows, ostensibly from the west, though it’s actually turned…
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Wales Coast Path, day 39: Marloes from Broad Haven
This is another two-car day. I attempt to park Car 1 in Marloes outside the Lobster Pot pub. The landlord, a middle aged man with a surly look, raps on a window, then unlocks the door and shouts across to…
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Wales Coast Path, day 40: Broad Haven from Solva
Lower Solva. A bright, cloudless morning, but with a cold, insistent northerly wind. This is where we left off two years ago, and seems the right point to resume our Pembrokeshire journey. The path leads up the Gribin, a long…
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Wales Coast Path, day 37: Dale to Dale
We’re in Dale for another week on the Pembrokeshire path, almost exactly two years after our first coastal campaign further north. Our cottage overlooks the Gann inlet, with a distant view of the Rhoscrowther oil refinery on the other side…
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Wales Coast Path, day 25: St Clears to Laugharne
A cloudless, still mid-April morning in a miraculous week of constant sun. We’re in St Clears, four of us, for a short and gentle stroll down afon Tâf to the sea at Laugharne, castle to castle. The castle at the…