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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…
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A west African honeymoon, 1913
Our honeymoon (1980) was spent on two bicycles in north Norfolk. Laughable by today’s standards, but also, maybe, by those of a hundred years ago. My brother recently gave me a copy of a family document I’d never seen before.…
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Wales Coast Path, day 23: Carmarthen to Llansteffan
Carmarthen town: a sunny morning at the end of a spell of hot spring weather. The three of us walk from the car park, along King Street and down Quay Street, with its blue plaques commemorating the eccentric historian George…
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Beth yw diben angladd?
Dros y gaeaf buodd Dr Angau ar grwydr trwy’r wlad yn ei glogyn du, ac yn anarferol o brysur. O fewn y pythefnos diwethaf bues i mewn tri angladd, yn Lloegr ac yng Nghymru. Byddai’r cyfanswm wedi bod yn bedwar…
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Wales Coast Path, day 22: Ferryside to Carmarthen
We join J. at Swansea station, on the two-carriage train to Carmarthen. A British Transport Police officer paces our carriage. Maybe coastal walkers, with their clumpy boots and aggressive waterproofs, rank only just below Cardiff City fans on the BTP…
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A cold field in Croesyceiliog
i.m. Roger Cecil (1942–2015) ‘When birds come to suffer by severe frost, I find that the first that fail and die are the redwing-fieldfares, and then the song-thrushes’ (Gilbert White, 12 April 1770) In a cold field in…
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Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett
Buster Keaton, the twentieth century’s greatest comic, and Samuel Beckett, its most naked and unillusioned writer, once collaborated on a short silent film, based on Beckett’s only film script. I hadn’t realised this till yesterday. Or maybe I did know…
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Atalanta
For International Women’s Day, here’s a Greek woman of formidable talent and power. Since 1935 she’s lived in Swansea, in the collection of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. She’s hidden away from public view at the moment while the Gallery’s…