Tag: small group tours

Pontcysyllte Aqueduct: Telford’s Canal in the Air Across the Dee Valley

Pontcysyllte Aqueduct: Telford’s Canal in the Air Across the Dee Valley Walk out onto the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and the ground simply falls away. A narrowboat-wide channel of water runs level through the air, almost forty metres above the River Dee, held in a trough of cast-iron plates that has been watertight since 1805. Nicknamed the […]

Belfast Political Murals: Memory, Community and the City’s Changing Walls

Belfast Political Murals: Memory, Community and the City’s Changing Walls Walk up the Falls Road from Belfast city centre, or along the Shankill a few hundred metres to the north, and the gable ends of terraced houses begin to speak: a hunger striker smiles down from the side of a political office, soldiers of the […]

Giant’s Causeway Geology: Basalt Columns and Northern Ireland’s Coast

Giant’s Causeway Geology: Basalt Columns and Northern Ireland’s Coast Few landscapes look as though they were made on purpose. The Giant’s Causeway does: some 40,000 dark basalt columns, most of them six-sided, packed together like the cells of a honeycomb and stepping down from the foot of the Antrim cliffs into the sea. Giant’s Causeway […]

Irish Diaspora in Australia: Migration, Memory and a Journey Back to Ireland

Irish Diaspora in Australia: Migration, Memory and a Journey Back to Ireland At the 2021 census, more than 2.4 million people in Australia named Irish among their ancestries, and historians suspect the true number with an Irish forebear is far higher. For most of them, Ireland arrives as fragments: a surname, a county remembered by […]

Siamsa Tíre: Ireland’s National Folk Theatre and Living Performance in Kerry

Siamsa Tíre: Ireland’s National Folk Theatre and Living Performance in Kerry In Tralee’s Town Park stands a circular theatre modelled on the ancient stone ringforts of the Kerry countryside, and inside it works a company with an unusual mission. Siamsa Tíre, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland, tells its stories through dance, song, music and […]

Harland & Wolff Shipyard: Belfast’s Industrial Heritage Beyond the Titanic

Harland & Wolff Shipyard: Belfast’s Industrial Heritage Beyond the Titanic Look east across the River Lagan from almost anywhere in Belfast and two yellow gantry cranes fill the horizon. They stand over the Harland and Wolff shipyard, where for more than a century the city built ships for half the world, including liners that carried […]

Donegal Gaeltacht: Irish Language, Landscape and the North-West

Donegal Gaeltacht: Irish Language, Landscape and the North-West Drive west from Donegal town along the shore of Donegal Bay and, somewhere beyond the fishing harbour of Killybegs, the road signs begin to speak only Irish. The village at the foot of the Sliabh Liag cliffs is signposted Teileann, not Teelin, because in law that is […]

Donegal Tweed: Wool Craft and the Atlantic Landscape

Donegal Tweed: Wool Craft and the Atlantic Landscape Look closely at a length of Donegal tweed and the colour comes apart. What reads from across a room as a soft heather-brown turns out, at arm’s length, to be flecked with tiny knots of orange, moss green, purple and sea blue, as though the cloth had […]

The Seven Churches of Aran: Early Christian Landscapes on Inis Mór

The Seven Churches of Aran: Early Christian Landscapes on Inis Mór Near the western end of Inis Mór, a little below the island road at Eoghanacht, a cluster of roofless grey buildings sits in a shallow hollow among graves, cross fragments and drystone walls. This is Na Seacht dTeampaill, the Seven Churches of the Aran […]

Dún Aonghasa: The Aran Islands Fort Above the Atlantic

Dún Aonghasa: The Aran Islands Fort Above the Atlantic On the southern edge of Inis Mór, three great curves of drystone wall run up to a cliff and simply stop, as if the rest of the fort had fallen into the Atlantic. Dún Aonghasa, usually anglicised as Dun Aengus, is the largest of the prehistoric […]

Cliffs of Moher Geology: Reading Ireland’s Atlantic Edge

Cliffs of Moher Geology: Reading Ireland’s Atlantic Edge Stand on the path near O’Brien’s Tower and the Cliffs of Moher look at first like a single dark wall dropping into the Atlantic. Look a little longer and the wall resolves into stripes: pale bands of sandstone and darker bands of shale and siltstone, stacked almost […]

Ireland and Northern Ireland Itinerary: An 18-Day Clockwise Journey Across the Island

Ireland and Northern Ireland Itinerary: An 18-Day Clockwise Journey Across the Island Most visitors see Ireland in pieces: a long weekend in Dublin, a drive around Kerry, perhaps a day trip north to the Giant’s Causeway. Taken that way, the island reads as a string of postcards. Travelled in one continuous clockwise loop, from the […]

Dingle Peninsula Archaeology: Ringforts, Oratories and the Atlantic Edge

Dingle Peninsula Archaeology: Ringforts, Oratories and the Atlantic Edge West of Dingle town the road narrows, the fields shrink, the stone walls thicken, and the peninsula begins to show its age. Within a few kilometres of Slea Head you can pass a promontory fort clinging to a cliff edge, a hillside scattered with corbelled stone […]

Powerscourt Estate and Gardens: Landscape Design in Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains

Powerscourt Estate and Gardens: Landscape Design in Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains Stand on the upper terrace at Powerscourt Estate and the garden seems to fall away from your feet: grass banks and stone stairs stepping down to a round lake, a fountain throwing its jet into the air, and beyond it all the pale cone of […]

Rock of Cashel: Kings, Bishops and Medieval Ireland’s Royal Outcrop

Rock of Cashel: Kings, Bishops and Medieval Ireland’s Royal Outcrop From the road across the Tipperary plain, the Rock of Cashel looks less like a group of buildings than a single thing that grew out of the ground: a limestone outcrop crowned with gables, a round tower and the broken crossing of a cathedral, all […]

Blarney Castle: The Stone, the Tower and the Making of Irish Eloquence

Blarney Castle: The Stone, the Tower and the Making of Irish Eloquence Most people know Blarney Castle for a single gesture: lying on your back at the top of a medieval tower, leaning out over a drop, and kissing a block of limestone in the hope of acquiring the gift of the gab. The gesture […]

Drukgyel Dzong: Bhutan’s Fortress of Victory and the Tibetan Frontier

Drukgyel Dzong: Bhutan’s Fortress of Victory and the Tibetan Frontier At the head of the Paro Valley, where the road runs out and the old trail begins its climb toward Tibet, Drukgyel Dzong stands on a low spur above the river. It was built in the seventeenth century to mark a victory over invading Tibetan […]

Paro Rinpung Dzong: Fortress Monastery and Art in Bhutan’s Paro Valley

Paro Rinpung Dzong: Fortress Monastery and Art in Bhutan’s Paro Valley Anyone who flies into Paro, or out of it, sees Paro Rinpung Dzong from the aircraft window. The runway follows the valley floor, and the fortress stands on the slope above the river, a whitewashed mass so large it reads more like a walled […]

Punakha Dzong: Bhutan’s Palace of Great Happiness at Two Rivers

Punakha Dzong: Bhutan’s Palace of Great Happiness at Two Rivers Punakha Dzong stands on a narrow spit of land where two glacial rivers meet, its whitewashed walls rising straight from the water and its golden roofs catching the light of a valley far warmer than the mountain passes above it. For more than three centuries […]

Dochula Pass: Himalayan Views, Chortens and the Road to Punakha

Dochula Pass: Himalayan Views, Chortens and the Road to Punakha On a clear morning the road east out of Thimphu climbs through blue pine and hemlock until the forest opens onto a saddle of grass, a small temple, and 108 whitewashed chortens banded in red, with the whole eastern Himalaya laid out beyond them. This […]

Gorumara National Park: Wildlife and Forests in India’s Dooars

Gorumara National Park: Wildlife and Forests in India’s Dooars Gorumara National Park covers only about 80 square kilometres, yet a late afternoon at one of its watchtowers can bring Indian rhinoceros, gaur and elephant to the same stretch of riverbank. It lies in the Dooars of northern West Bengal, where the last ridges of the […]