The Mist Wraiths of Snowdonia

Climbing the highest mountain in Wales – what to expect and who you’ll find!

Caernarfon

Caernarfon castle: symbol of oppression turned tourists’ playground. Plus its where Princes are made. Click to read more.

Penmaenmawr to Conwy

The hem of North Wales’ rough gabardine is folded at the coast and seamed with three trailing stitches. The oily bitumen grey of the A55, the rust orange of the railway tracks, and the indistinct fawn of a walker’s path. Its garment is broached at the shoulder by the jewel of Snowdonia – the highest peak in the nation.

Zagreb in Many Colours

Berlin is a geometric concrete powerhouse of triangles and squares. The stickers that adorn every Soviet surface advertise grunge bands, art shows, quasi-philosophical and geopolitical ideas.

Plitvice: A Paradise Born of Magic

That blue: it’s the blue of dreams. It creates flecks of white as the sun refracts; it creates shadows as it laps against the land. Furrows and ripples intertwine, and silver slips of light like stars on a clear arctic night, flash and flicker. It’s supernaturally clear surface will distort your depth perception: centimetres will turn into metres and metres will turn into miles.

Underneath the Plješivica mountains, the Željava airbase.

Exploring the abandoned underground airbase of Željava in the Croatian mountains an act of dark tourism or a vital historical site?

Boiling on the Adriatic

Split is a city flung onto a piece of rocky coast along the Adriatic sea. It was established by Diocletian, one of the few Roman rulers to drag himself up from the gutter. He worked his way up from a relative nobody to head of the Roman Empire. Leap-frogging from infantryman to commander of the cavalry, to Emperor of Rome.

Climbing the Pike

This week is a flashback to the time I climbed the highest mountain in England, Scarfell Pike, following the route from the Borrowdale Valley.

Histories from the Lakes

Last September, I packed up the car and headed off to the Lake District in Cumbria. The National Park immediately struck me as a tamer, greener version of Scotland. Not that I wish to undersell its sublime qualities; it truly is the land that inspired Wordsworth. But this week’s story is not about William or Dorthory, it is set in 2000BC, or there abouts, (with a few liberties) and tells the story of Holtfevar and Revan two Neolithical members of the Stone Axe Cooperative.

Castlerigg Stone Circle: Keswick

Just outside Kewwick, is Castlerig, home to one of England’s finest stone circles. Click to read more.