February 17, 2015
I’ve just finished a short run to Maes Knoll Tump from our holiday cottage. The Tump is a huge earthen wall nearly eight metres taller than the surrounding land, built to defend an Iron Age hillfort. It offers a panoramic view of Somerset including views to Bath and Bristol had there been no mist. As […]
September 4, 2014
I walked the coast path with Hugh today. Hugh is a writer and artist whose poems appeared in The Inner Sea. It started foggy and cool but by midday the morning haze had retreated to the horizon. We saw a seal surface to watch the waves rustle through the carracks, and a stonechat flitting and chirping about the rocks. […]
July 7, 2014
A certain ghost walk guide here in Cornwall finishes his tours with an enigmatic proverb: A person often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it. This is the opening line in Jean de la Fontaine’s fable, The Horoscope. On the one hand it seems paradoxical to say that by departing from your destiny […]
June 21, 2014
As we’re about to leave Basingstoke after nearly seven happy years, it might be appropriate to mention Thomas Warton who was born on the site of Glebe Gardens, not far from here. Warton was poet laureate between 1785–1790. This sonnet is dedicated to the River Loddon, which, now culverted in places, is said to run below ground at the […]
May 28, 2014
The weekend brought me to Dublin for a wedding. I had some errands to run in the morning and went out to beat the streets. Inevitably, I found myself in a bookshop on the north side of the river where I picked up some titles in the Penguin Great Ideas series. For a tense moment, it looked as […]