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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 […]
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 […]
Glencoyne Bay, Ullswater, Lake District: Wordsworth’s Daffodils
‘Beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze’ GLENCOYNE BAY Imagine for a moment this ‘spot in time’. The spot is between the main road and the water at the south end of Glencoyne Bay, now also known as Wordsworth Point. The time is April 15th, 1802, vividly described by Dorothy […]
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire: William Shakespeare
‘Upon entering the town of Stratford, a feeling, I trust, something more elevated than of mere curiosity, naturally depicts the steps of every admirer of our divine Poet towards that spot which gave birth to the most extraordinary genius this or any other country has ever produced…’ Samuel Ireland, 1795 KEY DATA Terrain: Pavements throughout […]
Inspiring Places: Bournemouth, Dorset
‘The Evergreen Valley’, ‘A city set in a garden’ ‘The pines, the chines, steeply-rising cliffs, parks, gardens, heathlands, amusements, esplanades, sands, and sprawl add up to the strange unique character of Bournemouth. A fascinating, pine-scented phenomenon’. Thomas Hardy ‘The real Bournemouth is all pines and pines and pines and flowering shrubs, lawns, begonias, azaleas, bird-song, […]
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