Category: <span>Beyond</span>

This is a special and unusual blog for me as it accompanies a walk I did with Clare Balding and her producer Karen for the Radio 4 walking programme called Ramblings. Accompanying me, to share our passion for landscape, were my freinds Andrew and Chris. This blog follows the route we took through the Tavy and Walkham valley, exploring a landscape history of mining, fishing, timber and leisure.

An opportunistic walk near my holiday accommodation led me to the most enchanting river I have ever walked. The River Gelt sculpts insane fluvial shapes in its bedrock channel, whilst the valley, which once clanged with the chisels of Roman soldiers, quarrying blocks for Hadrian’s Wall, hides the ghosts of these men in the graffiti they left on the quarry faces.

Searching out landscapes different to my Dartmoor home, in this blog I explore Lincolnshire – a landscape influenced by north sea transgressions and regressions of ice, sea, people and trade.

Born to parents who had moved from Carlisle, my grandmother Christiana’s first couple of years was spent in south Manchester, in the 1910s. Their stay here was brief, but the family connection to the area had been made. In this blog I explore the Gorton and Openshaw landscape with my focus on the Edwardian era and the places that my relatives would have known, a landscape more nuanced than the industrial city stereotype I had anticipated.

In response to the air raids that reduced much of Plymouth city centre to rubble at the start of 1941, my dad and his mother evacuated to stay on West Bohetherick Farm. This walk explores the landscape of Bohetherick and its agricultural and market gardening heritage.