It is always an absolute pleasure to drive through drive through Essex. Despite the popular media image of the county, it is heart-achingly beautiful, with it's pretty little villages with chocolate box thatched cottages. Mrs. P and I, along with a couple of young friends of ours, went touring this much overlooked county last summer. [...]
Kirkcudbright, (or 'Kirkubree') is a very picturesque, small fishing town on the South Coast of Galloway in Scotland. Daniel Defoe, when visiting this area in 1778, described it as: ... a pleasant situation, and yet nothing pleasant to be seen. Here is a harbour without ships, a port without trade, a fishery without nets, a [...]
Dumfries, the 'Queen of the South': important trading town on the river Nith, the administrative centre and foremost town in Dumfries and Galloway. It has, over the years, been home to many people of note, including JM Barrie, who schooled at Dumfries Academy, and John Laurie, who played Private Frasier in Dad's Army ("we're all [...]
It is late July and I am sitting in the lounge bar of George and Abbotsford Hotel, in Melrose. We had ended up here after traveling across country from Alnwick, stopping for a very pleasant afternoon at Abbotsford. I was having a pint and taking in the scenery: it's obviously a pub that loves its [...]
Abbotsford is a rather grand, gothic baronial house, just outside of Melrose in the Scottish Borders. It was built by Sir Walter Scott, the famed novelist, friend of Wordsworth and favourite of Queen Victoria. It's often said that Scott invented the idea of 'Scottishness', with his Romantic nostalgia for the Jacobite rebellion, with tartan clad [...]
I didn't have very much time to spend in Rugby but I was determined to visit as the little midlands town was home to one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, along with a great deal more literary history, much of it connected to the large public school that dominates the town. We [...]
Nuneaton! The very name is redolent of exotic holidays on sun kissed beaches, laying on fine white coral sand and sipping cocktails beneath tropical sunsets. It is actually quite a pleasant little Midlands town, complete with quirky local museum in a lovely town centre park and a love, bordering on obsession, for their best-known novelist. [...]
I've always liked Coventry. I first came here for a work conference at the University of Warwick. A slow afternoon had me catching a bus into town and taking a look around. In the 1940s, Coventry was home to a number of light engineering and armament factories. Between 1940 and 1941 the Luftwaffe attempted to [...]
She died in an upstairs bedroom,By the light of the evening star,That shone through the plate glass windowFrom over Leamington SpaSir John Betjeman, Death in Leamington Well, I'm back. It feels good to be back on the road again after so long behind closed doors. I hope I will gather enough information to see me [...]
In which I discover a hidden gem in the Essex countryside...
Literary Britain 