Passing Places Only Places that take time to get to – Scotland’s Islands; CalMac Ferries and 9 Distilleries. Jura, Islay and The Hebrides. Summer 2022, Westminster in upheaval, fuel prices rocket, a war in Ukraine, and record Summer temperatures. Scotland has many ‘A’ roads that are no bigger than farm tracks – all relying on the driver’s code of understanding that they are Passing Places Only thoroughfares. ‘B’ roads are virtually the same but with less traffic and fewer passing places. Above: The road to Kilchoman, Islay. Here plenty of warning of oncoming traffic but nowhere to pass. Below: ‘The…

In 1771, the celebrated English writer Samuel Johnson visited the remote Hebrides on his historic tour of Scotland – commenting and proselytising as he went. His remarkable journal provides a thorough account of many places on the tour before he reaches, homeward-bound, the Island of Mull; and in particular the small adjoining island of Iona. He makes no apologies in describing a land that ‘was starting to show signs of its loss of innocence’… an arcadia already curling at the edges. ‘A remote and black land with few people and a strange language’… Whether or not his observations were fair,…

The door in the great kitchen at Pembroke castle The door through which the 13 year old Henry Tudor escaped as a boy after being held captive in his own  family ‘castle’ by the invading Yorkists during the latter years of the Wars of the Roses. 1470.  The door led to a massive cavern and tidal wharf under the castle where he was to meet a waiting oarsman who caught the estuarine tide allowing them speedy deliverance from the arrows fired at them by the castle guards.  The cavern is said to have been the site of human activity for the…

Stone walls and Boundary Lines. Ownership and Family History Throughstone and Richmondshire. 2 words I learnt as I roller-coasted through the northern counties of Yorkshire, Cumbria and Northumberland. 2 words I didn’t know as the van heaved up one incline and down the next. I was in upland country; sheep country where the world seemed to be harsher than my ‘Chalk and Cheese’ of down south. A land of history told, in part, through its fields, walls and outbuildings. Richmondshire was once one of the largest self-governing domains in England, occupying a large slice of the North, spreading across terrain…

The saying goes: ‘Drink Hemlock on a Saturday, and you will die on Monday. Sunday will be the worst day of your life..’ That was in 300BC Plants and folklore, plants and medicine, plants and superstition. I realise looking around the garden, nearby meadows, fields and hedgerows that it is just this. Almost all of what is in the modern garden has been hybridised from the wild. In many cases over hundreds of years. Hemlock grows unchecked in our hedgerows, and whilst our strain may not be as potent as those used by the Greek executioners, it does carry a…

The last few weeks have shown us a myriad of graphical representations of the doom ahead. The graph has never been more popular – we’re all used to reading new data without words. But reflect on the fact that as global pandemics go, this is not the first time out for large swathes of the world’s inhabitants… below is a look at some that shook the people of the time. Is it a miracle we’ve survived? September 1665 was a bad month to be stuck in London. Wikipedia says: ‘The Black Death, also known as the Pestilence and the Plague,…