United Kingdom
Malham Cove, North Yorkshire: Anita Sethi
‘If you feel stuck in the clouds in your life and can’t see beyond a certain point, just wait and the clouds will clear.’ ‘Belonging is a need like water, air and food.’ ‘It was walking through nature that made me feel a sense of belonging and did wonders for my well-being’. ‘I longed for […]
Orford Ness, Suffolk: Robert MacFarlane
‘Nowhere has drawn me back more often’ ‘It has become a sort of Tintern Abbey for the contemporary’ ‘A metonym for a state we are now in, a clash and crisis and juxtaposition’ The Inspiration for this walk: ‘Ness’ 2018 It was Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Mountains of the Mind’ that first grabbed my imagination, but there […]
Inspiring Places: Glasgow, Scotland; Glasgow’s modernist writers
‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ said McAlpin. ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’ ‘Morgan saw Glasgow. A city with a great big heart; a city of opposites.’ The Inspiration for this walk: Edwin Morgan’s Glasgow Sonnets (1972) To be completely honest I knew none of the Glasgow writers until I started planning a trip […]
River Dart, Devon, source to sea: Alice Oswald
‘All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings’ The Inspiration for this walk: ‘Dart’ We have holidayed in Salcombe in South Devon pretty much every year for the last twenty. And bit by bit, as the boys have got older and stronger (and before I get older and weaker), we have walked further and […]
Brick Lane, East End, London: Monica Ali
‘See what I can do! The Inspiration for this walk: ’Brick Lane’ I read this book when it first came out in paperback in 2004, I remember at the time that everyone was talking about it. And Brick Lane itself was starting to become a ‘go to’ street. Now some say the book has not […]
Stonehenge, Wiltshire: are you a romantic or a rationalist?
‘Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves – or desires’ WHAT WE KNOW This is what we know for sure about Stonehenge: it was constructed over a very long period between 3,000 BC to 2,000 BC; it was, amongst other things, a burial ground; much of the stone was hauled from Wales; the keystones are […]
Highgate Cemetery – the creative choice for a burial
Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last — far off — at last, to all, And every winter change to spring Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, at the entrance to one of the tombs in the Circle of Lebanon ‘Better a spectacular failure, than a benign success’ […]
Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire: TS Eliot
The inspiration for this trip: ‘The Four Quartets’ TS Eliot seemed the most iconic of poets when I was at school. I saved up for the Faber Complete Poems & Plays, whilst my parents splashed out on this very grand Folio Society edition. I recall we got a Folio Society book every three months or […]
Belfast: a bubbling spring of twentieth-century poetry
Community, fellowship, exchange KEY DATA Terrain: Urban Starting point: Titanic Belfast, BT3 9EP Distance: 6 km (3.5 miles) Time: 1.5 hours Map: The route can be found on Google at: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?hl=en&mid=1wTcBVs0EpR8AQ86EnbyYceyCu5x1szQ-&ll=54.58245952594075%2C-5.956679726733729&z=14 Facilities: All city facilities BELFAST AND ITS TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETS If you had to name one city in these isles as the city of poetry, it […]
Cardiff: Roald Dahl
ROALD DAHL (1916-1990) In the nineteenth century, Cardiff was the world’s largest coal exporting port, and this created a diaspora around the docks of migrant communities from up to 45 nationalities that served the shipping business. These included Norwegian, Somali, Yemeni, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Caribbean and Irish people, creating the unique multicultural character of the […]
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