Ways To Peace

I don't know what it is about the Ways To Peace project at Tintern Abbey that does it, but the weather has it in for us every time! Last year our outdoor Festival readings took place in a spectacular downpour and last night's launch of the anthology invited similar conditions.... However, the event itself was a great success (indoors!) and the final product is a delight. Contributors come from all generations and many cultures; the writing encompasses peace in its widest sense - between peoples and cultures, with nature and the environment and inner peace. It was an enormous privilege to stand alongside a Palestinian refugee fleeing from Syria, a schoolchild desperate to preserve an intact world for his generation and older people whose memories of world conflict still haunt them seven decades on, to read and reflect. Thanks so much to Pascal Bidois, the custodian at Tintern Abbey, and to Val Ormerod, the driving force behind the anthology.

At the launch with Gloucestershire poet
Kathryn Alderman

Picking up where we left off ...

Part of my "getting straight over the summer" plan involved sorting out the filing cabinet - and that led to some interesting discoveries! Unearthing half-written poems, abandoned pieces of prose, some of which could be usefully resurrected. And they in turn reminded me of other sorts of projects which for one reason on another hadn't come to fruition but might still have some mileage in them - two quite literally.

Ten years ago I started the Wye Valley Walk and covered the ground from Chepstow to Hereford, well over half the total distance. Life got in the way and the project went into abeyance, but - especially as we now live not much more than a stone's throw from the river - it seems a good time to pick up on it again. We've only done two more days so far but they were both really enjoyable.

Another walk started but making only intermittent progress over the last few years has been the Wales Coastal Path. A real challenge that one - all 870 miles of it! So far we've covered about 170, from Chepstow to the far side of the Gower. But earlier this week I was in North Wales to undertake some research for a new writing project planned for the winter and I had the opportunity to do a few miles of the path just south of Barmouth on a glorious, windy afternoon, the Cadair Idris range soaring to my left and the sea pounding the shore to my right. I never fail to be inspired by such surroundings. Hopefully we'll be back on the trail there too before long.

The Mawddach Estuary