Out in the wilds of Essex there's an island you can drive to - if you can get past the escaped Lion first. The Dabbler sets off to investigate... That silly season tale of an escaped lion roaming the Clacton suburbs allowed many to indulge in one of those occasional gleeful ... Read More...
Dabbler Country
Out and about
Malty recalls an eventful night in the Scottish Highlands... The single track road running through Glen Torridon boasts some of the most majestic scenery in Britain, on its northern side and stretching the entire length of the glen are Beinn Eighe, home to numerous eagles, and Liathach the grey one, not ... Read More...
The country's leading folly-hunter takes us to the most terrifying tower in Britain, at which his love for pointless buildings nearly terminated... Essex has a number of folly towers of a more traditional sort: all are eclipsed by Bull’s Tower in Pentlow, a rather attractive, unostentatious Victorian brick tower in a ... Read More...
Gwyn's speed folly-hunting trip around Scotland takes him to Ross & Cromarty... Sir Hector Munro's folly was built to commemorate his own heroism: a replica of the Gates of Negapatam, an Indian stronghold he had captured from the Dutch on November 12th 1781 after a four week seige. After twenty years ... Read More...
Daniel Kalder learns there's a trick to successfully doing nothing outdoors... Like many British people, I grew up disconnected from nature. Though my small town was close to forests and woods and water, we pretty much left the animals and plants alone. Specialists, known as “farmers”, were our mediators. Every now ... Read More...
Nige recalls the day (26 June 2011 to be precise) that he fulfilled a lifelong lepidopterist's dream and first spotted that most elusive of butterflies, a Purple Emperor... I'd had dubious glimpses of this largest and most elusive of our butterflies in the past: high in the treetops, briefly outlined against ... Read More...
Gwyn has been on a speed trip folly-hunting round Scotland. The itinerary was carefully scheduled and every minute was accounted for. Here's the first of two Scottish folly posts: a visit to Banffshire... This sophisticated, rigidly classical monopteros is said to have been designed by William Playfair in 1788, although it ... Read More...
Not everything is getting worse, Nige admits. Our rivers have been transformed in recent years... Even I, a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, have to admit that in at least two respects life in England has unequivocally improved in the course of my lifetime. One is the range and quality of food available in ... Read More...
Nige debunks the English myth of the wild wood... I am, as readers of my blog will have noticed, a lover of woodland - but I really couldn't see what last year's fuss about the proposed sale of Forestry Commission land was all about [Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, called it "an unforgivable act of ... Read More...
Gwyn visits 'the Taj Mahal of Wales' and recalls a remarkable impromptu lunch cooked by none other than the late, great Fanny Cradock... We slouched into a pub last week, the Clytha Arms on the old Abergavenny to Raglan road. There were more dogs than people in the stone-flagged bar, and I ... Read More...
