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A Loamhole Dingle
Happy Valentine’s weekend! A few years ago, while poring over maps of Shropshire, I got distracted from my research and wrote this silly (romantic?) ditty instead. How many Shropshire place names can you find in it? A Loamhole DingleMarie Kreft Knockin on her door one knightonHe said, “My dear sweet…
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Read this book: Edith & I by Elizabeth Gowing
Edith & I is a travelogue which spans time as well as distance. In 1900, an English anthropologist named Edith Durham traversed the Accursed Mountains into Kosovo, shaded from the Balkan sun by her tam o’shanter. She was honoured for her humanitarian work and for championing the unity and independence…
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Pas-de-Calais: a cheat’s holiday
For my birthday in October Steve booked us a week’s holiday in a cottage in a rural French village called Tortefontaine, just over an hour’s drive from the ferry terminal at Calais. Until then, the very name Calais conjured up for me memories of a miserable booze cruise, drizzle, catching…
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Herefordshire with a babe in arms
Me, my husband and our baby on a self-catering week in Aylton, near Ledbury. It wasn’t the most ambitious of holidays. One of the leaflets in our rented cottage was for the Birmingham Botanical Gardens … less than five miles from our house. Steve and I joked about popping home…
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Searching for Shuttle: whale-watching in Nova Scotia
As the Mega Nova fishing boat carries me and a dozen other hopeful whale-watchers into the Bay of Fundy, our chance of seeing whales feels slim. Brier Island, where we boarded, has been snarled in fog since the evening before. The narrow stretch of water left visible by the low-hanging…
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Legflaps
I was coming down with a cold. My throat felt raw and my forehead was burning. Determined not to miss out on a single hour in Chengdu, I dragged myself around the city alongside Steve, slurping giant bowls of hot soup noodles and watching street kids playing elaborate games of…
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The rocks have eyes
There are still a couple of weeks left of the seal-watching season at Blakeney in north Norfolk. I took a trip out with Bishop’s Boats in early September, accompanied by my husband, mum and two dozen other tourists armed with cameras and cardigans. We ploughed through the chilled grey North…
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Up in the air: travels as a Hollywood producer
Thirty-six years of weaving movie magic have taken Boston-born Hollywood producer Ned Dowd all over the world. He’s lived it up in Beijing with Jackie Chan, spent months in Mexico with Mel Gibson and managed New York parking problems on a Gary Oldman film. I talked to Ned about the…
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Travels in Blood and Honey
A few weeks ago I attended the launch of Elizabeth Gowing’s delightful book, Travels in Blood and Honey: Becoming a Beekeeper in Kosovo. When Elizabeth first accompanied her partner Rob to Kosovo (where he had landed a job as adviser to the prime minister), her journey amounted to “an extended…
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Indelible Journeys 