Posted inWords
Sanctuary
We met at dawn on an industrial estate in the vast, dreary hinterland of my adopted province of Teruel, here in Aragón, North-Eastern Spain, with enough space to park trucks…
Posted inBooks
A River Runs Through Me by Andrew Douglas-Home
A clever title by a man with a name incredibly familiar to those of us of a certain age. In A River Runs Through Me, Andrew Douglas-Home gets the details…
Posted inWords
A Winter Walk Around St Ives
My eyes lighted on something dark, in the distance, on the beach. Coming closer, I saw it was a dead porpoise. Mouth frozen in a smile, skin radiating a silvery…
Posted inBooks
The Ghost in the Garden by Jude Piesse
In her wonderful book, The Ghost in the Garden: in Search of Darwin’s Lost Garden, author Jude Piesse observes that gardens have the unique distinction of being created by people as…
Posted inWords
Deliverance
For days there had been no signs of human life. Pine forests shrouded in snow and half-frozen lakes glittering in the sun stretched into an unspoilt Canadian wilderness. It was…
Posted inBooks
Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes
In Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, he remarks that the permanence of a mountain seems to structure our understanding of the natural world, thereby conditioning the eye…
Posted inBooks
A Thing of Beauty
I’d been looking forward to reading Peter Fiennes’ new book A Thing of Beauty since its first mentions on social media, having read and reviewed its wonderful predecessor Footnotes (2019,…
Posted inBooks
The White Birch
Edgelands, not the ones where concrete and vegetation intersect, but the ones where culture and nature face each other in the mirror. A major thread in Tom Jeffrey’s new book,…
Posted inBooks
Light Rains Sometimes Fall
One of the many things that have amazed me in the world is traditional Japanese art and architecture, I’ve always been fascinated by how intertwined buildings and bridges have become…
Posted inBooks
Goshawk Summer
James Aldred, an Emmy award-winning documentary cameraman and author of The Man Who Climbs Trees, has written this account of lockdown last year, based on his field diaries-kept while he…