‘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 […]
My sister and I are lying on slabs like flounders in a fishmonger’s. Instead of a bed of ice, though, we’re stretched out on heated marble. We move between three hot rooms, each resembling little chapels with vaulted ceilings, chatting quietly in the cooler one, applying face and hair masks in the middle one, and simply lying still, […]
The sun splashes off the lagoon and I shield my eyes to see the wave rushing up behind me. I’m lying on my big foam surfboard in perfect position as it arrives. “Three big paddle strokes to catch the wave,” is what my instructor, Owen, had told me. I do just that, pop up and […]
I am sitting on a sofa with my feet up, next to a log-burning fire, which is crackling away. The view out of the floor-to-ceiling window in front of me is on to a mess of deciduous forest stripped of its colour by winter. Beyond the trees, the main character of the piece, Loch Fyne, […]
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 […]
A capricious and cruel autocrat handing out privileges and punishments, women struggling to assert themselves, the populist mob at the gate – and through it all a decent man, we hope, steers a hazardous course. The first two books of Hilary Mantel’s epic Wolf Hall trilogy became a BBC series in 2015, and now the […]
The lane gets steeper and narrower, the roar of the river louder. We turn to cross the old stone bridge and, two farm gates later, are bouncing up through a forest of gnarly oak and moss-swaddled boulders to emerge on a grassy belvedere by the old farm. The last rays of sun are touching the distant peaks of Cadair Idris. There is not […]
Cross the causeway to another world, Kintyre Davaar island, off the Kintyre peninsula in south-west Scotland, is a true getaway: it is connected to the mainland by a shingle causeway, which is only possible to cross when the tide is low. There are a few cottages and cabins for rent, but a day visit (remember […]
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, […]