That blue: it’s the blue of dreams. It creates flecks of white as the sun refracts; it creates shadows as it laps against the land. Furrows and ripples intertwine, and silver slips of light like stars on a clear arctic night, flash and flicker. It’s supernaturally clear surface will distort your depth perception: centimetres will turn into metres and metres will turn into miles.
Category Archives: europe
Underneath the Plješivica mountains, the Željava airbase.
Exploring the abandoned underground airbase of Željava in the Croatian mountains an act of dark tourism or a vital historical site?
Boiling on the Adriatic
Split is a city flung onto a piece of rocky coast along the Adriatic sea. It was established by Diocletian, one of the few Roman rulers to drag himself up from the gutter. He worked his way up from a relative nobody to head of the Roman Empire. Leap-frogging from infantryman to commander of the cavalry, to Emperor of Rome.
Climbing the Pike
This week is a flashback to the time I climbed the highest mountain in England, Scarfell Pike, following the route from the Borrowdale Valley.
Histories from the Lakes
Last September, I packed up the car and headed off to the Lake District in Cumbria. The National Park immediately struck me as a tamer, greener version of Scotland. Not that I wish to undersell its sublime qualities; it truly is the land that inspired Wordsworth. But this week’s story is not about William or Dorthory, it is set in 2000BC, or there abouts, (with a few liberties) and tells the story of Holtfevar and Revan two Neolithical members of the Stone Axe Cooperative.
Castlerigg Stone Circle: Keswick
Just outside Kewwick, is Castlerig, home to one of England’s finest stone circles. Click to read more.
Death in Paris
The air was cold and damp. More than damp – the water sat in a dense humidity all around us like a cloying mist. Round me snaked the stacked coils of the dead – radius, ulcer, tibia, skull. So went the procession – the only physical remains of lives once lived, stored in hollowed out mines beneath the streets of Paris. These are the Catacombs.
Venice with Webbed Feet
Venice, the land of light, water and adventure. A city that exists only by the grace of God. So I decided to visit before it became engulfed by the tides of climate change.
Slug Cheese and Peeled Almonds
The Dales were, for the first hour, swathes of green velvet, scrubby moorland peaks and granite mountain tops. It wasn’t quite the blistering wilds made famous by the Bronte sisters. Instead, it was tempered by a kind of human tenderness which transmuted the land from desolate to verdant. Before our eyes flashed farmsteads, drystone walls and chocolate box cottages; all lying in wait for the artist’s brush.
The Pirates of Thornwick Bay
My first blog entry is about exploring the cliffs at RSPB Bempton and Thornwick bay in the county of East Riding, Yorkshire. This magic realm, and sanctuary for sea birds, remains one of the least visited places on the British Isles.
Narrative Places 