Category Archives: Gallery

Stories in the stones: Kalø Castle and the Mols Bjerge, Denmark

We share the causeway with cows. Or are they bulls? Perhaps someone can tell us, someone who hasn’t lived all of their adult lives in a city. In any case, bulls or cows both make me nervous, but the stream of families, walkers and other visitors making their way from the car park to the ruins of Kalø Castle out at the tip of the peninsula, don’t seem to be all that bothered. Warily, I step around them across the polished smooth cobblestones.

This is the end of Denmark’s longest medieval road, built some 700 years ago to link the castle with the rest of Jutland. The story goes that the castle was nearly impenetrable, built by King Erik Menwed after the defeat of a peasant’s revolt. This was a fortress aimed to protect royalty not from the threats of overseas, but potential enemies much closer to home. Over the centuries the importance of Kalø Castle waned, later becoming a prison and the local manor house for the region of Djursland, until the establishment of an absolute monarchy in 1660 brought the history of the castle as a castle to an end.

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On Cable Street, London

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It was a strange time to travel to London. The attacks on London Bridge and Finsbury Park, and the desperate scenes from Grenfell Tower – let alone the stories that were emerging of how something like that could come to pass, let alone how the survivors were being treated – seemed to weigh heavy on the city as the temperatures soared to record levels. We had lots to do and lots of people to see, but there was one free morning. Over breakfast Katrin and I discussed our options.

‘I’d like to see this,’ I said, pointing at a picture of a mural on my phone. It was only a short walk away, down Brick Lane and under the railway. A place I had never been to but a name which resonated. Cable Street.

On the 4 October 1936, Oswald Mosley and his British Unionist of Fascists planned a march through the East End of London. That their route took them down Cable Street was no coincidence. This was a neighbourhood with a large Jewish population, and Mosley’s Blackshirts were marching to intimidate. The mural that now stands on Cable Street on the side of St George’s Town Hall shows what happened next: the combined forces of locals and anti-fascist demonstrators made up of Jewish, Irish, Communist, Anarchist and Trade Union groups among others, gathered on Cable Street to barricade the route and stop the Blackshirts passing through. Continue reading →

The walk to the top and the possibilities of the mountain: Slemenova špica, Slovenia

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We drove up the Vršič pass, that high mountain road built by Russian POWs during the First World War that crosses the Julian Alps and links the Soča and Sava river valleys of Slovenia. The road consists of a series of seemingly endless hairpin bends, back and forth, passing the Russian Chapel built in memory of those POWs killed by an avalanche during the construction of the road. Up we drove, this time beneath blue skies, the walls of the high peaks rising up above the autumnal colours of the trees that lined the road. I had that flutter in the belly, the sense of excitement that comes with arriving in a mountainous landscape. The anticipation of the walk ahead. Imagining the views from the top and how it would feel. The possibilities of what was to come.

“The remoteness of the mountain world – its harshness and its beauties – can provide us with a valuable perspective down on to the most familiar and best charted regions of our lives.”
– Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind

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Waiting for the fog to lift: Bled, Slovenia

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Down by the lake there was nothing to see. The fog had descended overnight, filling the valley and hanging above the surface of the water. On the path along the shore runners and dog-walkers appeared as ghostly visions. Somewhere, out there, was the island of a million postcards, the castle on the rocky outcrop and the high peaks of the Julian Alps. Somewhere. But not for us, not yet.

We started to walk, following the shoreline path clockwise around the lake. The road was busy with tour buses travelling the short distance from the town to the place where the wooden boats are punted across to the island and its picturesque church. Above we could see the sun forcing its way through the fog. Visibility on ground level was barely fifty metres, and yet above there was already the first hints of blue sky.

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Up Conistone Dib, Yorkshire Dales

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We stopped at the village crossroads, a walker’s picnic on the bench of sandwiches and misshapen chocolate bars, while a pair of cyclists leaned their bikes against the stone wall and debated on which road they would do battle with speeding drivers next. A car stopped, its driver leaning out of the window to ask directions to a pub somewhere hereabouts. None of us could help, but a local woman in wellies could, sending him back the way he came. Summertime, lunchtime, in Conistone.

We had followed the river from Grassington, from the car park above Linton Falls and then upstream before taking a back road popular with speeding cyclists until we reached the village. After lunch our aim was upwards, following the path around the side of some cottages where family played cricket in the garden, right through the middle of their game. Around the back of the last house the limestone rocks from which this part of the world is built started to close around us. This gorge, formed most probably as a glacial drainage channel, was the aim of the walk.

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Sechs Kilometer (Ost) Berlin: Walking from Warschauer Straße

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There is no reason for this walk except for the locations of two appointments; one in Friedrichshain, the other in Hohenschönhausen. I call them both up on Google Maps and ask for the distance between them. A half second later and I have my answer: Six kilometres and an hour and twenty minutes when travelling on foot. Half an hour on a combination of trams. Fifteen minutes in a theoretical car. Outside it is overcast and blustery, but the forecast is that it should remain dry. Walking it is.

I start out from the RAW complex beside the railway tracks, below the bridge at Warschauer Straße. At home I have a reproduction of a 1902 street map of Berlin which tells me that this used to be a railway maintenance yard, part of a network of lines and stations in this corner of the city that linked Berlin with territories far to the east. Now it is a hub of cultural venues; of bars and clubs and galleries; a poster on an outside wall promises a swimming pool. Inside the walls appear to be held up by spray paint and fly posters.

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Feels like coming home? (Rotterdam to Hull)

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The journey began before we even caught a glimpse of a boat, a ship or a patch of water, let alone the open sea. The motorway, having swept across flat fields, canal-flanked and criss-crossed, now swung around Rotterdam and – beyond the pylons and the billboards, the railway wires and a raised bike path that might be a dyke – the first cranes of the Port of Rotterdam appeared against the skyline. It is the largest port in Europe, a fact that I knew and yet was unprepared for as we seemed to drive for ever past a procession of container yards, refineries, warehouses, yet more cranes and – finally – the first glimpse of ships flying flags from all around the world.

At the terminal for the ferry to Hull we stood in line as the ship loomed over us, above the waiting room for foot passengers (there were not many) and the wire fences that kept us all in place while advertising the sun-faded glories of the East Riding of Yorkshire to the travellers about to head across the North Sea. A family kicked a football across an empty patch of concrete. Motorbike riders compared horsepower and routes. Cyclists compared panniers and aching legs. We walked down the line and counted the numberplates.

GB. D. F. B. DK. NL. White letters on a blue background, surrounded by stars.

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Above the city, Prague

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The sounds of the city began to fade as we climbed the steep slope up from the river embankment; the squeal of the trams as they turned the corner to cross the bridge; the siren of a police car racing past the Rudolfinum on the opposite bank; the bells from any number of churches, whose spires rise up above the Old Town and, as we climbed higher, came more and more into view.

At the top we reached Letná Park we could see beyond the narrow streets of the Josefov and around Old Town Square, out to the TV Tower with David Černý’s babies ever crawling up the sides. After a few days of staring up at the castle we now looked across the ridge to it, to Petrin Hill and down the river towards the National Theatre, the New Town, and some modern tower blocks beyond. Continue reading →

Through the Granitz Forest, Rügen

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From the resort of Binz, on the coast of Rügen island, the path into the Granitz forest starts at the point where the promenade runs out, the neat paving stones giving way to a sandy track of dirt that skirts the beach until it plunges inland and up towards the high cliff-top trail. Germany’s Baltic coast can in general be pretty flat – a landscape of big skies, dykes and dunes, where the only things reaching up towards the clouds are electricity pylons or windfarms. But Granitz is a bit different, formed as it was during the ice age; an undulating moraine landscape that marks the furthest extent of a glaciers journey, like rubble pushed across a wasteland by a mechanical digger.

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Fragments from Rostock, Germany

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Stoltera

We arrived as the storm picked up, the narrow lane to our destination already beginning to freeze. In the darkness the trees whipped back and forth and we hurried across the slippery car park to lock ourselves away… it’s just a breeze our receptionist said. Welcome to the Baltic. The next morning it had blown itself out, and we walked the icy cliff-top path and then along the crunchy, frozen sands beneath. The water was glassy and still. We spied boats offshore and birds in the shallows. A long figure stalks the clifftop, picking his way along an overgrown path with large, unbalanced steps. Stay away from the edge! Only we could see that beneath his feet was a curving lip of sandy rock, punctured by holes that had been last-summer’s sandmartin nests, and beneath that… nothing.

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