Okay, I have to admit it. I am totally obsessed by many kinds of landscape. Initially the obsession was limited to a quite specific kind of country, wild and rocky places with a hint of human settlement, for me epitomised in the hugely complex contours of parts of southern Snowdonia in Wales. There was for a time nowhere on earth more captivating, more sublime in the imagination than those hills that rise up behind Harlech's fine castle overlooking Tremadoc Bay's golden strand. Not that the Rhinogs, as these modest mountains are called, are especially grand or high. They break no records. But in their details... in those little outcrops and dells, in their moss choked lakes and fragments of old forest, in the rocky ramparts, the Rhinog Mountains captured the magic of the Mabinogion.

Armadale to Ardrossan – the slow way
Here is the answer to the Scottish Slow Travel Challenge we posted in the hidden europe Notes section on 19 February. The heart of the challenge was to tell us the latest possible date on which it would be possible to leave Skye in order ...