501 Places

Last night I co-hosted the weekly Travellers’ Night In (TNI) event on Twitter. It’s basically a couple of hours of chatter with several hundred people around 10 timed questions on a particular theme. This week it was all about the UK. While the audience is international it is fair to say that the majority of [...]

Britain holds 60 million people on its relatively small landmass. For many visitors therefore it comes as something of a surprise that there are so many empty spaces in our country. Even the South East, where the population density is at its greatest, has many great parklands and open spaces. We may not be home [...]

20 days of British Airways strikes are about to get under way. Even before this disruption, Eyjafjallajökull has reared its ugly head again and shut down much of UK airspace, along with a fair chunk of the skies of western Europe. Air travel has never been so fraught with uncertainty, even at the height of [...]

I’ve already written about the excitement of flying into Barra. To many people, simply choosing a destination for the sake of the flight there might seem a bit pointless. So what is there to do once you arrive on this tiny Hebridean island? Well, the good news is that Barra and its neighbouring islands hold [...]

As one of life’s hopeless dreamers there are places, experiences and events that have long been on my wish list. Anyone who has a similar list will know that the list will never be empty. Each year another couple of places may be ticked off the list, while another dozen are added to the end, [...]

There’s something unique about life on a small island. You get a sense of community that is elusive to the places where most of us live. I’ve noticed this on our many visits to the remote corners of Scotland, and experienced this most of all on our recent trip to Barra, a tiny island at [...]

Turquiose waters, stunning secluded beaches, the ocean dotted with tiny picturesque islands and a warm friendly welcome from the locals. Where am I describing? The first thoughts when we hear these words are probably of the Caribbean, or of some beautiful resorts in Thailand or the South Pacific. Well, for those in the UK who [...]

Seeing the aurora borealis for the first time is one of my most vivid memories. We were staying in the Shetland Islands, around 100 miles north of the Scottish mainland, and had returned to our cottage after dinner. It was just before midnight, and being early April it was still bitterly cold when the wind [...]

In my first post last week I described a fictional journey from London up to the beautiful north west tip of Scotland. It was great to receive many suggestions of places I had missed, and also much doubt as to whether this intense itinerary would be possible to complete in one week. I have to [...]

In a previous 501 Places post I wrote about a crazy 3 day road trip we took with some good friends of ours who were over from America for a few days. London to Inverness in 2.5 days is not for the faint hearted, but it got me thinking. If we had longer, say two [...]