Nov 22, 2025 | Essays, Non-Fiction, Travel |
Ynys Enlli was among the many remote places of the west and north-west coasts of Britain and Ireland to be settled between around 500 and 1000 AD. During those centuries, an extraordinary migration occurred. Monks, anchorites, solitaries, and other devout itinerants...
Aug 29, 2020 | Non-Fiction, Travel |
I am wary of the dangers of fetishizing dialect and archaism – all that mollocking and sukebinding Stella Gibbons spoofed so brilliantly in Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Wary, too, of being seen to advocate a tyranny of the nominal – a taxonomic need to point and name,...
Mar 28, 2020 | Non-Fiction, Travel |
Although I knew Gaelic to be richly responsive to the sites in which it was spoken, it was my guess that other tongues in these islands also possessed wealths of words for features of place – words that together constituted a vast vanished, or vanishing, language for...
