Tag: walking
-
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. …
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
A reader walks out
In the huge and magnificent William Blake exhibition now on in Tate Britain there are many images that were new to me, even though I’d seen the earlier big Tate shows of his artistic work, in 1978 and 2000. One of them comes from a series Blake produced during the last three years of his…
-
Werner Herzog’s pilgrimage to Paris
Many think Werner Herzog our greatest living film-maker. His major fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s will always find new viewers. Aguirre, Wrath of God, a study in conspiracy, tyranny and madness, has a claim to be one of the most powerful ever made. Once you’ve seen it the first time, with its dense…
-
Offa’s Dyke Path, day 14: Clwyd Gate to Bodfari
This was the day we were not looking forward to. For a while the weather forecast was adamant: heavy rain in the morning, lighter rain for the rest of the day. But the heavy rain cleared early, and it was just spitting when I went out into the streets of Ruthin in search of a…
-
Offa’s Dyke Path, day 12: Trefonen to Castell Dinas Brân
Today was due to be rain-free, and it is. This fact alone lends us a lightness of spirit that lasts all day, another long one. We’re joined by our guestwalker and friend A., fit after his holiday in the Italian mountains. A taxi returns us from Oswestry to Trefonen. We’re immediately unable to find the…