There is an exceptional little museum in the unassuming village of Eastriggs, in Scotland’s Dumfries and Galloway. The Devil’s Porridge Museum tells an unusual tale, of ‘the greatest factory on earth’, what it produced and the people that worked in…
World Heritage Sites in Britain
Britain has 29 World Heritage Sites. The United Kingdom has 30, including the Giant’s Causeway and Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland but excluding overseas territories. It would have been 31, but Liverpool’s maritime mercantile city was, sadly, stripped of its…
A walk in Smardale Gill
Some years ago, we spent a happy couple of days with good friends in the Eden district of Cumbria. For many, Cumbria means the Lake District – which is, of course, a wonderful place; but there is more to the…
A walk in the Weald
The Weald is an area of outstanding natural beauty in South East England that, broadly speaking, stretches through the counties of Surrey, Sussex and Kent, between the chalk of the North and South Downs. It is characterised by small farms…
English Heritage or the National Trust?
People often compare the relative merits of Britain’s two largest membership heritage organisations, the National Trust and English Heritage. In fact, there are several heritage organisations in the United Kingdom that offer membership, the main ones being Cadw, Historic Houses,…
Kelpies
Any self-respecting student of folklore will tell you that, in Britain, a kelpie (or kelpy) is a Scottish water spirit, a waterwraith. Kelpies are shape-shifters, but usually appear in the form of a horse and are malignant, deriving pleasure from…
The time capsule of Culross
It’s become something of a cliché, to describe a place as ‘being frozen in time’, or similar. But in the case of Culross, a small village on the north bank of Firth of Forth in Fife (try saying that after…
Tower Bridge, up close and personal
We all do it. We’re busy, things around us blend into the background. And so, for all the years I spent living and working in and around London, I had never visited Tower Bridge, one of our capital’s most iconic…
The chuffing romance of Haverthwaite
Imagine a simpler, hate-free, monochrome world, where you know your doctor, civil servants are both civil and servile, politicians benign and dogs only ever bark happily. You are secure in the womb of grim, factory-stained, buildings. There’s a footbridge over…
From Ribblehead to Jericho
Ribblehead Viaduct is one of the wonders of Victorian construction. It also provided the inspiration for a UK TV drama Jericho, which premiered in January 2016. It’s not hard to be impressed by Ribblehead. Not just because it’s quite big…
St Leonard’s, Chapel-le-Dale
We stepped down the lane in the dappled sunlight of a still frosty winter afternoon. It has an ancient, lived-in, feel to it, does the hamlet of Chapel-le-Dale. Sitting astride a Roman road, evidence of long-vanished communities are shown on…
Atlantic Bridge
This is the Bridge over the Atlantic, also known as the Atlantic Bridge; I daresay someone’s referred to it as Atlantic Crossing too. You’ll find it in Argyll, Scotland, about 10 miles south of Oban. Atlantic Bridge’s real name is…
The remains of London’s white friars
It beggars modern belief just how much London – well, pretty much everywhere in Europe, I guess – was once dominated by the Church. Did you know there were more than one hundred parish churches within or just outside the…
Buckler’s Hard
They used to build big ships on the New Forest’s tranquil, pretty, Beaulieu River. Men of war that formed part of the Royal Navy’s wooden walls, when Britannia ruled the waves: vessels 150 feet, or more, in length, with 70…