Tag Archives: villages

Selworthy, Exmoor, Somerset With sweeping views to Dunkery Beacon – the highest point on Exmoor – Selworthy is a glorious place to visit. Sunshine-yellow thatched cottages, many owned by the National Trust, light up the village green. The Periwinkle tearoom serves cake and cream teas, and the gift shop is …

The rice fields are washed away. The coconut trees and chilli plants, flooded with salt water, are all dead. The farmers’ fish ponds fail, the water so high that the fish swim over the nets. And rubbish, carried by the tides, floats in and out of homes with doors that …

Within minutes of leaving Edinburgh’s Waverley station, we’ve shaken off the urban sprawl and entered a world of emerald hills, meandering rivers, and tiny blink-and-you’ll-miss-them villages. There are buzzards and deer, too. Under brilliant blue skies we surge into a land bathed in history and intrigue. Borders railway I’m back …

‘Tonight there will be you and me and the goats,” my guide Vassia Mastrogianni explained as we began our car journey into Crete’s White Mountains. At the wheel was Antonis who, ominously, Mastrogianni had just introduced as “a very good driver.” It wasn’t long before I could see why, as …

As we pull up at the gate of Lavoura da Bouça, a huge but friendly mastiff is there to meet us. Behind him waddle a gaggle of noisy geese, followed by a scattering of sheep. In the back of our brightly coloured rental van, my two sons and their school …