Author: Laura Parker

Red, red, rose

Thirteen ways to see a rose. Just for fun: a storyboard and voiceover script.

Walking with the Colonel: the d’Arcy Dalton Way

The evening sun was yawing down the Ridgeway as we approached Wayland’s Smithy. It was the shortest day of the year and we’d walked 66 miles to be here.

Who grew your jumper?

With 33 million sheep, it can’t be that hard to find a 100% British grown and made jumper. Or can it?

The women’s quarters

History is revealed by crumbling brick courses and corrugated iron poking from willowherb-strewn rubble.

Broadway twilight

The man takes a step back, and looks again at the girls amid the flowers.

The blessed bramble

Every thorn is picked out, every drupelet of blackberry shines. In Scotland the ‘blessed bramble’ had amazing healing properties.

The cypress trees of Provence, and, eventually, van Gogh

Come September, my yearning for a Keatsian beaker full of the warm south was growing stronger, and the prospect was getting closer.

It is indeed a light in a dark place

The lights have gone on, and off, continuously, at Bell Rock Lighthouse for over 200 years.

Last letters from a forgotten war

‘This has been an experience, alright.’ How recently-discovered letters to a sister in Edinburgh have breathed new life into a young Scottish casualty of the Korean War, which ended 70 years ago this month.

Woolgathering

Why did wool go out of fashion? And are Britain's sheep an endangered species?