Written by There’s no room at the inn in Bethlehem, Carmarthenshire. Because there’s no inn. No shops. Only a former post office turned private residence. I can see a few barns, but there’s not much else in this tiny linear village. The official population is almost 200, though only a few dozen live in the centre. There’s a primary […]
We cross a narrow strip of land under vast skies and follow a slim road. It cuts a straight line through the heart of County Clare’s only peninsula – a jagged spearhead-shaped piece of land that dangles downward, like a tail, right into the Atlantic. The landscape tapers as the mouth of the River Shannon […]
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 […]
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 […]