Time for a walk in the Yorkshire Dales. We will stroll from the old market town of Settle, up into the hills and do a circuit of around 5 miles. The route will take in the lonely starkness of Attermire…
A bit about Slaidburn
Slaidburn is a village in Lancashire. It is one of those places that proves the north of England is not (or no longer) purely a place of dark satanic mills, clogs, cloth caps and Whippets; all pies and prejudice as…
The Pig War
A guest post by author, Anne Clare In spite of its name, ‘The Pig War’ didn’t have much to do with farm animals. Rather, the unfortunate demise of a pig who ventured into the wrong garden in 1859 almost led…
The gardens at Sandringham
Sandringham is the private Norfolk home of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Unlike the monarch’s other properties, such as Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, which are owned by the Crown Estate, Sandringham is one of two residences that the Queen…
Walmer and the Warden of the Cinque Ports
We strolled to Walmer Castle from Deal in September sunshine. Infamous as the place where the Duke of Wellington died, Walmer Castle was one of Henry VIII’s so-called ‘device forts’, a network of artillery strongholds built to protect England against…
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…
Inside Worcester Cathedral
The views of Worcester Cathedral, elegantly perched on the east bank of the River Severn, are surely among the best of any cathedral in Britain. Inside, Worcester is also one Britain’s most fascinating cathedrals. This compensates for it being a…
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,…
Domus Dei, a Portuguese princess and the Blitz
My mother would love to walk from Point along Old Portsmouth’s walls, past the Sally Port, Square Tower and above Battery Row. There was the Regency Grand Parade, scene of many ceremonial occasions in days gone by. There was the…
The outcast dead
This is Cross Bones Graveyard, surely one of the saddest places in London. Its story belongs within a wider narrative about poverty and prostitution, an important aspect of the two-thousand year history of the Borough of Southwark. Just an unfashionable…
Walking around Oxford
I’m not easily given to hyperbole; I’ve told you that a million times. But it is genuinely hard to think of a British town that can be quite so achingly beautiful as Oxford. Perhaps I should qualify that by saying…
A Christmas Carol – a ghost story of Christmas
“I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses…
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…