Richard Gwyn

Extreme weather in the Pyrenees

The photo reminds me of a painting by one of the old masters. The scene is Biblical. A shepherd hauls a bale of hay for his flock of terrified goats. Plumes of smoke drift across the land. There… Read More

Sculpting the Sky

For several years, on and off, I have been trying to locate certain ‘stone sculptures’ or rock markings high in the Sierra of the Alberas, within a few kilometres of the village of Rabós. Puzzled by a signpost… Read More

A poem on the sky

  Reading Jean-Christophe Bailly’ The Animal Side, I find this lovely passage about watching a murmur of starlings: ‘ . . . one evening on the Loire and over a period of hours, the perpetual movement of a… Read More

Waylaid by a man-root in the Pyrenees

  As we follow a trail across the Alberas – the lower ranges of the Pyrenees as they dip towards the Mediterranean – I am stopped in my tracks by an outgrowth of woody root-stuff in my path,… Read More

Burial chamber

When you go in search of dolmens, or megalithic tombs, they are not necessarily where you last remember seeing them. If you remember them at all. This one never was so far, nor the path so steep, nor… Read More

The Discovery of Slowness

Met up with this tortoise on a walk in the Albera range yesterday morning. The Alberas are home to the last natural population of the Mediterranean tortoise (Testudo h. hermanni) in the Iberian Peninsula, and they are a… Read More

Elephants in the Alberas

  Other than an early family holiday and a single trip to Barcelona in my early twenties, my first real taste of Catalunya was in 1984. Penniless and without purpose, I was walking down the coastal road from… Read More