Archive | Travel articles RSS feed for this section

Robin Mead admires the Burrell Collection in its purpose-built Glasgow home Wouldn’t it be nice to have enough money to buy anything you wanted? How about a really grand house? Or bigger car, perhaps. And a luxurious holiday, like a world cruise. But once you were back from that round-the-world tour, what else would there […]

Anyone who has been a Cub Scout will recognize the names of Akela, Baloo, Bagheera and Kim: names traditionally given to Cub leaders.  They are all animals in The Jungle Book, and all sprang from the fertile imagination of one of Britain’s most prolific authors and poets, Rudyard Kipling, writes Robin Mead. Kipling spent time […]

  Lincoln looms up out of the flat Fenland landscape with almost shocking abruptness, writes Robin Mead. Hills are rare in this part of Eastern England – so, over the years, man has made the most of the city’s natural defensive position, and it is now crowned with a trio of Gothic towers, a windmill […]

When they are sizzling under a summer sun blazing down from huge skies, England’s flat marshlands seem to be alive with the sounds and smells of nature at its bountiful best. But at other times they can be cold, lonely places, with a very odd feel about them, writes Robin Mead. None odder, perhaps, than […]

We all know about the pyramids in Egypt, and their transatlantic cousins in Mexico. But did you realise that there are also six newly-discovered pyramids on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands? Or are there? Six mysterious stone structures were discovered above the village of Guimar a few years ago. Experts say they are pyramids, and […]

You may not have guessed it from Queen Victoria’s dour and dumpy appearance in her later years, but after the death of her beloved Prince Albert she had one great passion in life: long-distance walking. She was also fond of solitude, and found room for both deep in Scotland’s Cairngorm mountains, where she and Albert […]

Known as “the Venice of the North” and “the City of Diamonds”, Amsterdam is also a City of Fun. Romantics might pick Paris, and shopaholics might choose fashion-conscious Rome. But when it comes to choosing a continental city for a holiday during which you just want to let your hair down, there is only one […]

History books say the flower-filled Atlantic island of Madeira was discovered around 600 years ago by the Portuguese explorer, Zarco. A rather more romatic story says that it was first visited by an eloping British couple, Robert Machim and Anne D’Arset, who ran away to sea when Anne’s father, a Bristol merchant, decided Robert was […]

The villagers of Ayot St Lawrence, a tiny hamlet hidden away in a maze of narrow country lanes near Welwyn, in Hertfordshire, were more than a little mystified when the famous author, playwright and philosopher, George Bernard Shaw, came to live in their midst in 1906. He was everything they mistrusted: a tall, bearded, Irish-born […]