Written by ‘No one,” says Clare, grinning broadly and handing me a cycle helmet, “comes back sweating from one of our rides.” Looking at the Super Monkey I’m about to clamber on to – a gleaming black machine, modelled rather like a Chopper bike from the 1970s, only with triple-width tyres and the (all-important) powerbox attached to […]
I don’t remember when I first heard about Frenchman’s Creek. Not Daphne du Maurier’s pirate romance, but the house of the same name near the Helford River. An old stone cottage, the colour of clotted cream, that hides in the woods by a burbling stream. Perhaps I dreamed it? I stayed once, one winter, but […]
If you want to reach Shank Wood log cabin, the key is to keep going: to the very top of England; deep into the woods; right to the edge of a river. As we drove through pockmarked fields, and down bumpy dirt tracks, steeling ourselves for a steep, muddy descent, I began to realise just […]
Wakefield Actors say “rhubarb” to appear to be chatting. It’s easy to say the word quietly. Here in the national capital of this tasty perennial the stalks are – right now – growing, blushing, sweetening silently in the dark. The harvest season starts in mid-February, when shed doors are prised open and the gathering-in commences, […]
Two swans and six dusty-grey cygnets mew and whistle as they glide in single file along the canal. Silver birches wiggle their leaves in the gentlest of autumn breezes. Auburn, ochre, russet and shades in between glow in the afternoon sun. It’s time for a sit down and a cuppa. I’m not in a national […]
Blickling Hall, Norfolk Blickling Hall is a handsome house that boasts gothic architecture and plenty of atmosphere. However, the old Tudor house that once stood here is what truly made its ghostly name. It is said that Anne Boleyn continues to haunt her childhood home, carrying her own severed head as she walks the corridors. […]
Some of Northumberland’s attractive coastal towns, wild countryside and interior villages are about to become more accessible thanks to a new railway line from Newcastle to Ashington set to open in December. Coupled with the Tyne and Wear Metro receiving its first new fleet of trains in more than 40 years, visitors without a car […]
You couldn’t make it up. As early autumn darkness deepened around Whistlewood Common – tealights a-flicker, guitars twanging around the campfire – I found myself sitting between Peter Wood and Gill Forrester. It was a pincer movement of nominative determinism: Wood, a woodworker and teacher of heritage crafts; Forrester, community and wellbeing manager at the […]
Pulling a wheelie case along the stone streets of Bath, I feel I may as well be wearing a sign reading “tourist on a mini-break”. But when we check in to the Roseate Villa – a 15-minute trundle from the station – and the man who greets us asks for our car registration, I get […]
At 8.45am, I stroll down the steps of The Queen at Chester hotel and into the midweek flow. The roads are full of delivery vans, the station is lined with taxis and the pavements are busy with commuters. I move among them lightly, a roamer bound for distant lands. Well, distant-ish: I’m a coffee to […]