Tag: walking


Sep
2022

thing 50: ‘My soul is sunk’:* St Cuthbert’s Way, part (iii)

Categories: nature, pilgrimage, poetry, reflection, travel, walking
Is a Kitkat a chocolate bar or a biscuit? This might not seem an important distinction but when you’re 7 miles in and the “chocolate bar” promised in the hotel packed lunch turns out to be a Kitkat, you can feel cruelly misled. These things matter, is all I’m saying.

Breakfast had been rather good, you see. I had Eggs Florentine and coffee, served in a grand salon with huge mirror panels with fancy glass lights on them and the kind of embossed, gold, fol-de-rol wallpaper which only makes sense in big public spaces like this. Jenny and I were tucked (more…)


Mar
2020

thing 48: ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’: Blackwell House

Categories: reflection, travel

Of course, Keats didn’t live in the age of the halogen bulb. If he had, things might have been different.*

I was feeling the need to find somewhere lovely and just be there, with no demands, difficulties or despairs. Blackwell House is only a quarter of an hour away and I had a visitor coming for the weekend. Excellent. That would do the job nicely.

The perma-rain—fairly discouraging as far as getting onto the fells is concerned—was due to lift a bit on the Saturday afternoon, so (more…)


Oct
2019

thing 40: ‘what will survive of us is love’: St Hilda’s way, part (iv)

Categories: celebrating the everyday, grief, mindfulness, nature, pilgrimage, reflection, travel, walking
This would be a fine place to spend eternity.

From the lichened drystone wall where I sat the land rolled away to the horizon, a series of gradual grassy undulations punctuated with clumps of shrubs and trees. In the distance the peat browns and heather purples of the moor spread their muted patchwork; within the tiny churchyard itself, oaks, ashes and other trees were stretching (more…)