I know it may hard to believe for dedicated easy hikers, but thousands of visitors pass through Edinburgh every year without setting foot on either the Water of Leith Walkway or Arthur’s Seat, preferring to spend their days in and around the Old Town and its neighbouring districts. They surely are missing something, but so…
Most cities in the world were founded near a body of water, and for most old cities, this body of water was a river that provided fresh water, a transport connection to the wider world and a handy sewage disposal system. Edinburgh ticks the latter of these boxes, but having said that, it is equally…
This week and next, we shall go on two classic Edinburgh walks, both of which offer you a unique experience. The first one resembles a Robert Burns poem: unpolished and a bit rough, full of drama and life, while the second is flowing and melodious like a Sir Walter Scott novel, featuring great set pieces…
Göttingen is no longer famous, but it should be. The story of this town in the heart of Germany is a metaphor as poignant as the tales of Easter Island or Dunwich, the mightiest medieval city on England’s east coast until it was flushed into the North Sea by a series of landslides and violent…
For a daytrip outside Bristol, we recommend a hike around the Clifton Suspension Bridge, easy-to-reach via city bus line no. 8, … … or an urban walk through Bath, one of Britain’s foremost tourist attractions and the only place on earth that has been listed twice as a UNESCO World Heritage Site: once in its…
For centuries, Bristol and Liverpool were the two main hubs of Britain’s highly lucrative Atlantic trade, but when this trade collapsed after the end of WWII (mainly because Britain lost its empire of colonies), the tales of these two cities took sharply different turns. Liverpool entered a steep decline, losing nearly half of its population…
If last week’s destination of Bamberg is worth a detour, near-by Würzburg is worth a trip. Würzburg, the unofficial capital of the Bavarian Baroque, bursts at the seams with architectural drama and spectacle, most famously on the Alte Mainbrücke Bridge … … and in the grandest Bavarian Baroque palace of them all, called simply the…
The word Bavaria will, for most people, bring to mind images of alpine idylls, of women in dirndls and of men in lederhosen. But there exists another Bavaria beyond that: a world of twisted shapes, contorted bodies, and garish colours. This is the world of the Bavarian Baroque, a unique variety of the style which…
The idea was to explore one of Central Europe’s largest urban parks, a park which is roughly the size of a small country (all right: the country I am thinking of is Monaco) and which also doubles up as the main exhibition space for the world’s most famous exhibition of contemporary art. The idea was…
The island of Ireland meets the ocean on a frontier of vertiginous cliffs and sandy beaches that stretches out for more than 3000 km, enough to guarantee a good deal of variety. Much of this coastline is pretty rough and rugged: above all in the west, where mighty rocks are forever lashed by the furious…