Britain’s forgotten peninsular is still being ignoredThe first question at the St Ives constituency hustings is about mobile post office provision in Godolphin Cross. I knew it would be. We sit in a Methodist church in Helston, under a sign: …
Why you should be a thick traveller
Anthropology is in some ways an odd and creepy thing to do. Anthropologists spend a lot of time watching people, often people who are very different from themselves, in the hope of understanding them. If done wrong, as it has …
How narcissism killed the tourist
Look up images of Alpe di Siuse and Lago di Braies on Instagram, and you will find thousands of posts showing what appears to be a glorious alpine meadow and a captivatingly secluded glacial lake, ringed by the peaks of …
How the British conquered Majorca
In the mid-Twenties, the author Ada Harrison visited Majorca and discovered that it had “fallen to Britain”. Majorca had “become one of those places which, the English say, are being ruined by the English”. The result was that the Hotel …
Interrailing wasn’t all sex and sunshine
My school days were plagued by the annual July ritual of the French mistress asking each girl in turn, “Comment vas-tu passer tes vacances?” I grew up in Kent’s gin-and-Jag commuter belt, so Italy, Spain and France were favoured destinations. …
How Outlander resurrected Culross
If you stumbled across Culross on a summer’s day, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d wandered into a Dutch master’s painting. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. The charismatic, curiously foreign-looking Fife village could be the lost cousin of …
Why Scotland sacrificed its wilderness
When my aunt met my uncle, he was a pipe-smoking deerstalker, employed by a Highland estate to manage a herd of reds across some 20,000 acres. He had a team of terriers for fox control, he often rehabilitated injured birds …
Italy’s corrupt beach politics
Italy has almost 8,000km of coastline, but going to the beach is a bit like trying to sneak into a nightclub: the cool cats and slick service are enticing, but it’s also crowded, expensive and sometimes depressing. Even on a …