Author name: Cheryl Lucas

Google Maps can be unreliable at the best of times when you’re travelling in China, but in the southern megacity of Chongqing, a map of any kind turns out to be almost entirely useless. Built across a series of impossibly steep mountainsides and vertiginous valleys at the dramatic confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers, […]

Bolsover Castle, topped with turrets, sits at the crest of a hill with the best view in Derbyshire. You could be forgiven for thinking it must be the home of a medieval knight, if not a wizard. But really it’s a gothic, chivalric, romantic recreation of a medieval castle, constructed by a 17th-century aristocrat. He

On a blue-sky Saturday morning, I joined a foraging hike in Sintra-Cascais nature park, a former municipal wasteland and now thriving ecosystem on the outskirts of Cascais in Portugal. Progress was deliciously slow, thanks to our passionate guide – ecologist Fernanda Botelho, Portugal’s foremost herbalist and wild forager. We’d barely made it out of the

Sitting on the Giza plateau, in the butter-light of sunset, I was asked by Mahmoud (owner of a camel called Michael Jordan) which was my second favourite of all of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Of course, the Great Pyramid of Giza (a renewed Insta hit now that a family of dogs has

Britain’s highest aqueduct Thomas Telford’s Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is the centrepiece of a world heritage site that crosses three counties and two countries. They call it “the river that runs in the sky”, and there is a rough magic to standing halfway across, looking down on the tumbling River Dee, source of the slow-moving flow at

Frost tints the landscape silver as we set up our easels in the watery morning sunlight. On the horizon is Burrow Hill, a gentle surge in the pancake-flat Somerset scene. Local artist Frances Watts talks me through how to mix colour palettes and then, with her help, I attempt to capture some of the wintry

Accounts of tenants illegally subletting rental properties by listing them on Airbnb and Booking.com, without the permission of their landlords, have hit the headlines in recent months. While there’s no denying that the convenience of these accommodation booking platforms has transformed holidays – making independent travel more accessible and affordable – that convenience often comes