The women’s quarters
History is revealed by crumbling brick courses and corrugated iron poking from willowherb-strewn rubble.
Author: Laura Parker
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?
The house that poets built
Come with me to Poets’ Corner
Let’s visit the house at the end of the block.
Through the dooryard where the lilacs last bloom’d,
Doon the road
A small child is poking her foot into a patch of sticky tar on a narrow country road. The gooey bubbles are irresistible.
Cumulonimbus
Cloud poem