hidden europe 46

hidden europe 46 reveals a Europe well removed from the mainstream.

Join us on a ferry to the Icelandic island of Heimaey and come with us for a walk through Lisbon to discover the home city of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. We roam from Scotland's Cairngorm Mountains to a small town in Bavaria. We explore the coast of Suffolk and speed north from Paris in the driver's cab of a Eurostar train.

Picture above: Looking north up Glen Dee towards the Lairig Ghru with Devil’s Point on the left and the snow-covered slopes of Ben Macdui in the background on the right (photo © Alan49 / dreamstime.com).

Summary

hidden europe 46 reveals a Europe well removed from the mainstream.

Join us on a ferry to the Icelandic island of Heimaey and come with us for a walk through Lisbon to discover the home city of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. We roam from Scotland's Cairngorm Mountains to a small town in Bavaria. We explore the coast of Suffolk and speed north from Paris in the driver's cab of a Eurostar train.

Amid the waves: Heimaey

The Vestmann archipelago lies off the south coast of Iceland. A ribbon of islands, all of volcanic origin, remind us that here is a part of Europe where landscapes are still rapidly evolving. Surtsey appeared almost overnight in 1963. Phil Dunshea reports from Heimaey, the only island in the Vestmannaeyjar with a permanent population.

Exploring Lisbon with Pessoa

Think of writers who are intimately associated with a particular city: Kafka and Prague, Joyce and Dublin, Svevo and Trieste... or Pessoa and Lisbon. Pessoa did for Lisbon something which few other leading writers have done for their home city. He wrote a guide for tourists visiting the city. With Pessoa to hand, Iain Bamforth sets out to explore the Portuguese capital.

Heart and soul: the spirit of Altötting

Join us as we visit the town of Altötting in Bavaria. The remarkable success of Altötting lies in its appeal to all-comers, be they devout Catholics, loyal Bavarians or merely casual sightseers. The town, which hosts one of the leading Marian shrines in Europe, lies in glorious countryside just north of the Alps.

Revisiting the Cairngorms

Nan Shepherd's book The Living Mountain is often acclaimed as a prescient example of the genre now often known as New Nature Writing. We take a look at a classic text on Scottish landscapes which was first published in 1977 - more than 30 years after it was written.

Pity the poor horses

Thomas Tilling revolutionised bus transport in London. Among his pioneering ideas was the notion of having regular bus stops along a route. But the company that bore his name was not always in the forefront of developments. In 1914 Thomas Tilling Ltd still ran London's last ever horse-drawn bus service.

Railway ghosts

Literary ghosts haunt the pages of mid and late 19th-century fiction - from Henry James The Turn of the Screw to Charles Dickens' The Haunted House. One of the spookiest tales of all is Dickens' The Signalman, a fine short story which may have been influenced by the train crash in which Dickens was involved in summer 1865.

Elbe excursions

A new ferry powered by liquefied natural gas will make its first journey from the island of Helgoland to the port of Hamburg this month. It'll be a rare chance to cruise in comfort up the River Elbe to the German port city.