There is a stripe of mysticism in me. No matter how much I argue with it, fascination with the esoteric, with things unexplained, remains. My explorations of such subjects are cautious and cynical, refusing to believe in or subscribe to anything in particular. Yet still, there is something and I remain unsure as to what exactly […]
Northumberland rolls and undulates as you speak the word, mirroring the landscape it names. To drive the arrow-straight Roman roads up here, the wildest, emptiest and remotest county of England, is to feel like you are sailing above some terrestrial ocean of expanse. Ochre and umber fields roll away either side, rising and falling, until […]
An April weekend, longing for adventure and difference I packed up my wee Renault Clio and drove north. I had figured out that with careful rearrangement of seats I could, if I lay at a sharp angle, sleep just about horizontally and comfortably in this tiny space, thus somewhat recapturing the freedom of having my […]
I have a list, created some time back, long before I thought of coming to Durham, entitled ‘Places I would like to see one day’. Escomb Church is the first place I put on it. Thus it was the first eager destination in my explorations of Co. Durham. It is Saxon you see and an […]
It is a cold, dark mass pressing at Britain’s back. In our wake, out of sight and out mind for many, for me certainly. The romantic, jagged, forward-looking west coast taking most of the attention. West is in front, east is behind. A landscape of wide flats and off-colour beaches. An image of the North […]
My heart was set on Cross Fell, ‘Fiends Fell’ they call it. The highest point in the Pennines. Reputed to be the home of demons and evil, a reputation probably gained from the shrieking Helm Wind that blows across its slopes. It has been calling me for a while and is first on my list […]
A powerful place. The North Pennine AONB is a landscape of scarred, runneled, barren moorland. The hills are long, wide and flat, not particularly tall but they emanate a sense of empty, eerie grandness. The valleys – ‘dales’ as dey called up norf – are populated, by very pleasant villages actually, but in between them […]
The Moor is an occult place in all senses of the word. Mostly bypassed, hidden in plain sight, it dominates the landscape yet it is diminutive in the scale of most uplands. It is a world given to juxtaposition. Alien and natural, wild yet tamed, secretive yet exposed, wandering up here is to be amongst […]
Aneurysm, dead before he hit the riveted iron floor of the bridge, the small hours of a February morning. A small craft warning in Lundy/Fastnet, nothing serious, a moderate gale, a cold northerly blowing fast arctic air across the Irish Sea. Easy for the jaded, reliable RMS Sehnsucht out of Cork en route to Bremerhaven […]
I have overlooked Pentewan, the small, quiet village on the south coast that grew up in. Taken it for granted, as we seem to do, purely because it has always been there for me. So I have been reading into it and in doing so uncovered quite a bit more than I anticipated. Pentewan has […]
