Category: Travel

Castelnau

The Boileau Arms sat on the south side of Hammersmith Bridge at the beginning of Castelnau Road. Since the 1980s it has changed hands and name many times and is now The Castelnau. All this is terrifically relevant to Gascony where Castelnau is a common place name.

Bastide Town

The French are better at preserving their architectural heritage than the English. Gascony (aka the Gers) teems with bastide towns built from the 12th to the 14th centuries.

Five Go Down to the Sea

The title may ring a bell if you grew up on a literary diet of Enid Blyton. In fact we were four as our fifth had a knee injury and we didn’t have Timmy, the dog in the Famous Five series.

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Categorised as Art, Travel

Nature Notes

The soft water, clean air, quietness and lack of light pollution in Yorkshire was good for my skin and I slept better. One lunchtime it was too hot to eat outside; unusual in Swaledale and the farmers were out in force tedding, windrowing and baling; making hay while the sun shone.

High Pint

Tan Hill is only about four miles due north. It is a stiff two hour climb across marshy moorland made boggier by the path being on the Pennine Way but luckily it was what passes for a perfect Summer day up here.

Mucking about in Muker

I’m grateful to Ned York both for his slice of Stonington history and for giving me a day off yesterday. But now I’m a bit behind.

Wodehouse in Swaledale

After dicing with death for almost five hours on the M1 it was good to change down a couple of gears and drive up the narrow, winding road to Swaledale and Keld. The cottage is old-fashioned with thick stone walls, a small stone-flagged kitchen and so on.

Swaledale

Today I’m storming up the M1 with Robert to Swaledale in Yorkshire. Specifically to Keld, the village where Rupert Hart-Davis had so many happy holidays with his mistress. They moved there eventually when he retired and was able to marry her.

Bob a Blog

I hung around SE Asia in 1989, based in Singapore. Inspired by one of the funniest travel books I have ever read, Into the Heart of Borneo by Redmond O’Hanlon, I spent a long weekend in Sarawak. It was published only six years previously, in 1983, so not much had changed.

White Vin Man

  One of the pleasures of being in France is getting to know the region; its flora, fauna and vineyards. No sign of a hoopoe yet but plenty of vineyards.