Tag: walking
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Wye Valley Walk, day 2: Llandogo to Symonds Yat
This morning’s taxi back from Tintern to Cleddon has a punctured tyre, so Kate of Celtic Trails, luckily based in Tintern, is our chauffeur back up the frighteningly steep and narrow lane. As we pass through Llandogo we spot the two elderly backpackers we saw yesterday, the Couple from Chepstow. At Cleddon our old friend…
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Wye Valley Walk, day 1: Chepstow to Llandogo
It’s a gloomy Tuesday morning in September – leaves are already on the pavements – and four of us have gathered for the group photo in the Castle car park in Chepstow before making a start on the first half of the Wye Valley Walk. C and CE are veterans of our first walk from…
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Father Toban, the greatest scholar in the world
It’s late summer, 1854. George Borrow, walking around Wales, has arrived at Holyhead. He stays overnight at the ‘Railway Hotel’ – reluctantly, because he detests railroads and never takes a train if he can do the same journey on foot. In the morning he explores the town and then finds himself on the breakwater at…
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Cwm Cadlan
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 a lane off to the east. After climbing gently for four or five miles across…
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Field
The simplest way to get there is from the top of the road that climbs up from the bay. Turning left at the signpost, you walk along a broad path. At one point it’s ankle-deep in mud, like most Gower footpaths in this damp and Covid-walker winter. Suddenly the path opens out into a field. …
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Thomas Traherne goes walking
Today Thomas Traherne is counted alongside George Herbert and Henry Vaughan as one of the great ‘metaphysical’ poets of the seventeenth century. All three, interestingly, were men of Welsh and Welsh Borders origin. Herbert was born in Montgomery, Vaughan came from Llansantffraed near Talybont-on-Usk and returned there to live, and Traherne was probably born in…
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Cwm Amarch
There are places in Wales – places no one would call remote – that few people, even those living here, have visited, or even knew existed. Cwm Amarch, it would be safe to say, is one of them. I got to Minffordd early enough – before ten o’clock. Normally, on a Monday in mid-September, you’d…
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John ‘Walking’ Stewart, an extreme pedestrian
In his time Foster Powell was known for mighty feats of pedestrianism. But his achievements pale in comparison with those of a rather younger contemporary, John ‘Walking’ Stewart (1747-1822). While Powell’s stage was mainly limited to England and Scotland, Stewart walked over large parts of the globe. As well as his wanderings he was known…
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Foster Powell, the great pedestrian
When he was 21 years old Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to Wales for a walking tour with his Cambridge friend Joseph Hucks. In a letter written in Denbigh in July 1794 to Robert Southey he summarises the trip so far, and writes, From Bala we travelled onward to Llangollen, a most beautiful village in a…
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Grass for pillow: early Japanese travel poems
Last year Penguin published a selection of classical Japanese writings about travel. Travels with a writing brush, edited by the Australian translator Meredith McKinney, didn’t receive much attention at the time, but it’s a wonderful and wonderfully varied introduction to poetry and prose written in Japan between the seventh and seventeenth centuries. For anyone who’s…