Take a world tour of monsters, from vampires in Serbia and giants in Cornwall to festivals of dragons in Bavaria and werewolves in Louisiana. Source: Monsters reflect our darkest fears, from zombies to werewolves. But they also bring us together

I picked up Emma Jane Kirby’s The Optician of Lampedusa: A Tale of Rescue and the Awakening of Conscience in Otis and Clementine’s, the used bookstore/café/cat rescue I visited in Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia. I thought it might be a book at least tangentially related to walking–or perhaps walking-adjacent–because the refugees fleeing Afghanistan, Iraq, and … Continue reading 31. Emma Jane Kirby, The Optician of Lampedusa: A Tale of Rescue and the Awakening of Conscience →

Stations like Stroud (and Macbeth)   They’re great theatre, railway stations, don’t you think? The platform as the stage with Life and Existence itself in the limelight. For it’s almost as if a state of beatitude is attained whilst sitting on that plat...

View from a Carriage Window: Fields of Ridge and Furrow near Minety Gaze out of your window between Kemble and Swindon, Look left and right between Purton and Minety, And you will see a clear pattern of ridge and furrow (‘Like corrugated fields or wave...

Mark your calendars! The first 3 workshops connected to “A Line That Grows” at Test Plot MN have been scheduled! All offered free of charge – bring a friend: Sun, July 6, 4:30-5:30pm 5 Senses Walk, led by Ellen Mueller This exercise from the book Walking as Artistic Practice, entitled “Five Senses” will invite participants […]

I bought David Orr’s The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong in Otis and Clementines, a used bookstore in Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia, which also facilitates cat adoptions and has a café. The book looked interesting for three reasons. I had recently skimmed an article about … Continue reading 29. David Orr, The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong →

Gloucester Quays and Making the Connections Start your walk by Phillpott’s Warehouse – No plaque mentions that Thomas Phillpotts Benefitted from some seven hundred enslaved people, Nearly three hundred of whom were shared ‘investments’ With Samue...

Citizen John Thelwall, William Cobbett, and Rural Rides on the Train   In the summer of 1797, when the country feared a French invasion and the Fleet mutinied at the Nore and Spithead, ‘the most dangerous man in England’, ‘that Jacobin fox’, the r...

Life in a Railway Factory: Alfred Williams, the Hammerman Poet Born close to Brunel’s broad gauge at South Marston, While Richard Jefferies measured the red brick growth Of New Swindon’s terraced street advance, You studied express trains from farm and...

From Stroud to Swindon for a Football Match (Brunel All the Way) Start your journey at the Platform One Café, Coffee and croissants and Katie and Rick, 3 tables, 6 chairs, a trunk, 15 railway puzzles (Always one on the go for travellers with a brief en...

The Glue Pot I always like visiting the Glue Pot, I like its position in the Railway Village: A sentinel of Swindon’s heritage, With open doors to the pavement To welcome local and visitor alike. I like visiting the Glue Pot in springtime: Lengthening ...

Dear Famous Five, If you want a great day out then you ought to come to the STEAM Museum in Swindon. Because this is what I saw when here today on holiday:   A gift shop, a fire engine, giant locomotive wheels, name plates and numbers, signals, ho...

History at Capel’s Viaduct It’s a great walk down to Capel’s Viaduct, Past old ridge and furrow and tenterhook hedgerows, Teazles here and there to raise your nap, Imagining the patchwork quilt of fields of two centuries ago, Field-names such as Bacon ...

Matthew drops me off in the parking lot at Pomquet Beach and wishes me a good walk. I stride down the boardwalk towards the water. That boardwalk saves the dune habitat, mostly blueberries and dwarf spruce trees, from being trampled by visitors. At the beach a sign explains that rare piping plovers nest here, and … Continue reading A Pilgrimage from Pomquet Beach to St. Ninian’s Cathedral →

A Stroud Valleys Railway and Canal Walk   At first glance, it might seem a bit odd to link old railway stations and halts near Stroud with Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. But if I give some famous lines a Dr Beeching tweak then I think you’ll know what...

A Tale of Two Water Towers, A Tale of Two Stations, A Tale of Two Rivers   It takes less than an hour to walk from Kemble station to the source of the River Thames: it’s usually dry at the spring-source, although I have seen bubbles surface from t...

I saw C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet on the shelf in the guest room at my friends Matthew and Sara’s place, and I was curious. I read the Narnia books when I was a kid, but I didn’t know Lewis wrote science fiction. It looked short enough that I could finish it before … Continue reading 28. C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet →

Railway Life Part Four A spring time step in his walk to work, On past the gas works, the pub and the chip shop, A wriggle of his hips as he walks past the football pitch, With egg and bacon for a fry-up on the shovel; But back in the house, she sits f...

Railway Life Part Three It’s full steam ahead – Until, freezing in the cab, paper in his boots, He gets stuck in a wind-whistling loop, Out here in some unsheltered, open landscape; Or, shovelling six tons of coal Choking in some seeming endless ...

Railway Life Part Two But down at the running shed: All is different! Hustle, bustle and red-hot tumult: Fill the tender! Water the tank! Empty the firebox! (Cough on the dust, choke on the fumes, burn your hands.) Smash the clinker! Draw the firebar! ...