The Golden Gate of Byzantium
I was thrilled, after taking the old train along the Marmara shore to Yedikule (Seven Towers), to find myself standing before the legendary Golden Gate of Byzantium. It looks sadly […]
Author Archives: theromantictraveller
Eros strikes again in London
Piccadilly Circus is at the throbbing heart of London and for years visitors have crowded under the statue of Eros, which was originally designed as an angel of mercy but […]
Side by Side by Apollo
Side has become a victim of its own popularity. You reach it by driving down a 3km asphalt road off the main Antalya-Alanya coast road on Turkey’s south coast, heading […]
Armstrong’s Cragside – almost parallel lives
William Armstrong is my favourite eminent Victorian inventor, maybe because he was a Geordie like myself, born in Newcastle in 1810. His house at Cragside – the house where modern […]
Fleeting time
I spent some of the best Friday evenings of my life walking home from London Bridge where I worked back to my flat in Pimlico in the 1980s. The route […]
Plague pits and theatrical ghosts in the West End
Most of the familiar but somewhat opaque names for different parts of London have real significance if you scratch the surface a bit. The Strand, for instance, is a name […]
Did Queen Boadicea catch the Hogwarts Express?
Some English monarchs have had a rotten deal in terms of their interment. Not all of them ended up in Westminster Abbey. The remains of Richard III were recently found […]
The Assyrians are coming – the siege of Lachish
The town of Lakisu in Judah was captured by the Assyrian King Sennacherib in 701BC, the fourth year of his reign, as part of a campaign to crush rebellions that […]
The Ashurbanipal ‘Lion Hunt’ reliefs
Lions, representing a raw force of nature as well as being no doubt at one time a practical problem for herdsmen, are shown being killed by rulers in the late […]
Tower of Lies
As I’m plodding through ‘Wolf Hall’ at the moment I thought I’d have a wander round the Tower of London again to absorb some Tudor atmosphere. It’s not difficult to […]
theromantictraveller 