You’ve got to love the UK. Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives happens to own an anatomy book from the library of Sir Isaac Newton. Professor Wood took us down to Special Collections for our last class. She laid out a beautiful array of 18th-century maps of Wales, 19th-century hand-illustrated fairy books, and incredibly intricate …
I took a jog in Bute Park. And by jog, I mean floppy fast walk for the purposes of exercise and/or paper procrastination. In Bute Park, there’s a walled garden that looks like this: Not being particularly interested in plants, I’ve never wandered in before. I was, however, more interested when I saw this: So …
I just found this post in the deep dark bowels of my drafts folder. I never uploaded it. This post dates to my five unsupervised days in Amsterdam. So apparently raw herring is a classic Dutch food. Typically it’s served with pickles and raw onion. For anthropologic purposes, I felt the need to try it. …
I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to sitting in a coffeeshop that just happens to overlook a castle with bits of 2,000-year-old Roman wall embedded in the battlements. Look out the window:
My microfiction feedback group shouted at me for putting a Scottish river monster in their Welsh river in my piece “Under the Blackweir.” I’m an American. I don’t know anything. You’ve seen the Blackweir before. This is what it looks like when the River Taff is not frozen over: And speaking of monsters, I’m trying …
The truism goes: “Most Welshmen are fluent in street sign.” Only about 18% of the population speaks fluent Welsh, but all the museum plaques and street signs are bilingual. After four months here, the only Welsh words I know are: Araf, slow (probably pronounced AR-av, though I’ve never heard it aloud)—because whenever the word “SLOW” is painted on …
Ruthin (RITH-in) was an accidental footnote hanging off the end of my long weekend excursion. It was merely a stopover where Gillian kindly dropped me off at nine this morning so I could catch the bus to the Wrexham station. So how did I end up at Ruthin Castle, you may ask? Predictably, I got …
Among the ramparts of Moel Fenlli two days ago, I noticed a stone that looked vaguely like an arrowhead just off the path. I picked it up for a closer look. It had razor edges and a perfect tang (this is not the right word, but think of the tang on a sword, and then think of …
Here’s a reasonably good image of the earthworks at Moel Fenlli. Scanning from right to left, see how the hillside dips abruptly into a ditch and then rises again in a rampart? That’s man-made, circa 3500 BC. Imagine digging enough of that to surround a whole village. Now imagine doing it with nothing but a …
Gillian manages the tiny local history museum in Llangollen, so I tagged along to see the town. I know, I know, I say “I want to move here” about three-quarters of the places I travel. But if I was going to move anywhere in Wales and it wasn’t Conwy, it’d be Llangollen. Llangollen (sort …
(Photo: Part of Offa’s Dyke Trail as it approaches Moel Fenlli) My impulsive jaunt to Llanbedr DC has turned out to be one of the most spectacular field trips of my life. About 15% of that is due to staying across the street from a hillfort, and the other 85% is due to staying with …
(The subtitle of this post could be “…Prior To Almost Missing The Train To The Right County,” but the latter is a less interesting story). Finding myself with an unexpected four-day weekend, I impulsively searched “North Wales” on airbnb. I found a lovely room in a cottage in Llanbedr DC hosted by an archaeologist named …
The fun thing about 19th-century brick dormitories is that when it’s 70 degrees and sunny outside, it’s 80 degrees and musty inside. And when you open all the windows, every spider in Cardiff comes in to host the Welsh Arachnid Convention on the ceiling. And in a building of a hundred girls, you’d be amazed how …
I win.
I took a field trip to Oxford to meet up with high school friends Miriam (atheist religious studies major beginning a term at Keble College) and Regina (world traveller who tagged along for the ride). First we had tea at an unbelievably posh tea room that has its origins as the second coffeehouse in England …
I thought boiled cabbage was just something orphanages served in Victorian novels. But no. Thank you, Aberdare.
Today’s lecture topic was the Eisteddfod, the annual poetry competition that technically dates back to 1172 (although in its current form it was invented largely by, yes, the Victorians). On the edge of campus there’s still a modern stone circle from the year that Cardiff hosted the Eisteddfod. A new stone circle used to be …
I’ve made my triumphant return to Cardiff, having done nothing more incompetent today than lose my second umbrella of this semester. I’ve been living out of a duffel for three weeks. In principle, there’s something very romantic about the gypsy rover idea. In practice, I’m so ready to have the rest of my wardrobe back. …
Circa 1870. This is where the dirty jobs were done—cleaning fish, washing dishes, and so forth. The scullery maid was the lowest-paid and lowest-ranking member of staff.
You can’t be a travel blogger visiting the Netherlands without doing a post about the windmills. I was going to do a series of photos walking you through all the mechanics of the windmills at Kinderdijk, until I realized I don’t really understand the mechanics of anything invented more recently than the wheel. So here, …