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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I’m home. A year and half has passed. Going from winter to summer in 24 hours landed me in the humid air of Heathrow. Body clock shot, seasonally confused. I had forgotten the feel of England in summer and I have spent the subsequent week revelling in it. Lush and verdant. Despite the depressive homogeneity […]
A few days ago I was reading of Norilsk, an unimaginably oppressive, filthy, cold, dank industrial city high in the Arctic Circle. Once known for its Soviet Gulag labour camps (in which tens of thousands of prisoners died), it is now a hub of mineral mining. Nickel primarily but also palladium, cobalt, arsenic and coal. […]
Just off the south side of the arterial A30 that cuts the Moor in two one can find Temple. A collection of farm houses and out of the way cottages, there is not much other than the small community that dwell here. Temple Church is the prime attraction. You see, if you blunder across anywhere […]
