Humans have grown up with trees, at once a place of shelter, and of threat, of easily generated myths, yet bestowing a soothing magic. It comes as no surprise that trees should be at centre stage in our current search for effective recuperative measures to address our climatic misdeeds. Indeed, […]
Norway
Norway is famed the world over for dramatic scenery, with high mountains alongside a sometimes surprisingly blue sea. In the span of humankind, most of the region was beneath an ice sheet, kilometres thick, which sliced the tops from mountains, then carried the debris along in rivers of ice to […]
There are sights that immediately tug at the heartstrings for many people, perhaps more than we imagine. To my mind, a sight of the open road is a symbol of freedom, of potential; of the choice to go or to stay, to feel that one’s personal space extends beyond the […]
Svartisdal, for Bob Cranwell, imbued a sense of place. I was so lucky to learn this little part of history at a time when so much of it was still open to my enquiry. I was on my first trip of many driving a 10 metre bus on camping tours […]
I was entranced and delighted to hear chunks of a programme on Radio 4 one day, (link at end) which confirmed what I’d been telling folk for years – particularly those who travelled with me on camping trips in Scandinavia. I’ve since found that my mishmash of ideas is far […]
As an aside (before I’ve even started !), I’ve had an attack of synchronicity – today I got through the post a card from my opticians, reminding me of a sight test due (I have them every year, sometimes more often as I have glaucoma in the family), and also […]
…….I had felt there was an option that needed exploring, from my first visit there. Once having climbed high enough above the slippery rocky slopes of the main valley, the ridge offered an excellent high level walk back to the shoulder above the camp, where I knew there was a […]
It was in the midst of powerfully absorbing wild scenery and offered a lot of chances to explore, besides the obvious draw of the glacier, and I went off often to find out more and more about the area.
We’d arrived in Svartisdal in Northern Norway the previous evening having driven south over the Arctic Circle and set up our camp on a shoulder of land overlooking the valley. They were in the third week of a camping tour of Scandinavia and had great weather throughout the trip, rather […]