Knoydart cover

Knoydart, 2016

Knoydart is one of Scotland’s most beautiful but least accessible areas, where a difficult history of land ownership still casts a shadow over the community’s cautiously optimistic future. I spent a week walking, cycling and exploring there in May 2016. Here are a few posts from the trip.

Interchange

Montparnasse.  My head was slowly adjusting to the French signs and adverts, to the sound of a not quite familiar language, and the value of prices in a currency I didn’t often use.  The same hubbub and background noise of any major transport interchange, blurred by the high roof, but in a slightly different accent.…

The Next Stop

I got back this weekend from a six-day journey down the Inverness to Edinburgh train line.  I stopped at every station, twenty-three in total, including my start and end points.  I tried to spend at least a couple of hours in each place, staying overnight where timetables dictated.  It was an interesting chance to see…

Scratching surfaces

A passing comment to someone on Twitter a little while ago about how much I enjoyed Berlin despite being there only very briefly, got me thinking.  Sometimes it’s all too easy to pass through places, to float in and out of them, and in doing so fail to scratch the surface, let alone dig deeply…

Planning the next adventure

I’ve got two trips for this year bubbling away in the planning stage, and they’re both rail-based. The second one, scheduled for the summer, is the bigger of the two.  Nicole and I will be travelling Europe by train, overlapping with the southern France leg of Niall’s world wonder hunting and taking in a total of six countries.…

The Syrians of Slovenia

The first time I met him, it was barely minutes after arriving in the Slovenian coastal resort of Koper.  It was September 2001. We were fresh off the bus, from Ljubljana if I recall correctly.  While Niall watched the bags I was despatched into town to suss out our intended accommodation options. I must have…

Going off the rails?

You may have read a wee while back about the Scottish Government’s consultation on rail services in Scotland beyond 2014. When launched, it made a few headlines because of eye-catching questions like whether alcohol should be banned from trains or whether the sleeper service and daytime cross-border journeys between the north of Scotland and England…

Annecy and Geneva

I’ve begun uploading photos from our time in beautiful France and neutral Switzerland.  We’ve been staying with friends in Annecy, a lovely medieval town in Haute-Savoie, and have also been to Geneva for the day. I’ll write more soon, but keep your eye on the evolving photo set in the meantime.