Beauty and abomination in borderlands travels

Richard, who is 77, spent six years on his explorations of Shropshire, Herefordshire, and into Wales and his project has reached fruition with his book "Border Crossings – Then and Now in the Welsh Marches."

He dips into descriptions of the area from visiting writers from the days before the word "tourism" was first coined, and brings them up to date with what he discovered for himself on his own travels.

Among other places, those travels brought him to Ludlow, a town of many architectural gems.

"A walk around Ludlow's main streets and quiet lanes is to walk through 900 years of architectural history," he writes.

However, it's not all good news as he explores Corve Street and its eyecatching Georgian facades, many with a medieval core.

"There is just one flaw now in this otherwise unblemished collection, and that is the abomination of a modern Tesco store built over the site of the old market where local farming stock used to be bought and sold every week."

Of Llandrindod Wells, he says the town does not appeal visually to everybody, and tells how it is described by Mike Parker in "Real Powys" as "a fake film set of red-brick suburbia and Victorian turrets."

Richard writes: "Llandrindod is a nice town, but I can see where Mr Parker is coming from. It is not a Welsh-looking town. Parts of it remind me of childhood holidays at Lytham St Annes where the streets were lined with elegant red-brick houses and I expected to find the sea around every corner."

He says that a recent survey identified Llandrindod as the happiest place to live in Wales.

Bishop's Castle is one of Richard's favourite towns in Britain. "It is a village-town, unpretentious yet completely self-centred. I first came upon it in 1974 while on a holiday tour of the Welsh borders."

He was struck by its main street, and the brewery building at the top of the town, which he remembered thinking resembled a cathedral of beer.

"Being a townie boy from the industrial north, to see all this was a game-changer for me, a magical introduction to a timeless world and a country community living in the very slow lane. I loved it then, and love it still – enough to keep a second home just two miles away."

His book takes him northwards exploring and describing borderland places along the way, including of course larger towns like Shrewsbury and Oswestry, and ultimately to Prestatyn and a sculpture on the seafront dubbed the Polo Mint, which he says was the culmination of years of pressure by various walking groups who wanted to see something to commemorate the 177-mile long Offa's Dyke Path.

Richard, who was born in West Didsbury, Manchester, includes in his book a thanks to the locals of the Miners Arms pub at Priest Weston "where I spent many contented evenings after long days typing my work" for making him feel at home.

He lives in the village of Backwell in North Somerset, but bought a caravan with a permanent pitch at a touring park on the Shropshire-Powys border where he wrote much of the final section of his book.

His first book, "In My Own Time," was published in November 2013.

"It told of a walk I made through Herefordshire following in the footsteps of Henry Thornhill Timmins, a Birmingham artist who did as I was doing a hundred years earlier," he says.

"Following my retirement, I had no hesitation in taking to the roads and fields again. I had more time on my hands and now I had the inclination to write another book. But this time, my horizons were wider. Herefordshire was just one small part of the border area between England and Wales known as the Marches. During my researches, I learned of others who had toured the Marches long before me, some even earlier than Henry Thornhill Timmins and their tales fascinated me enough to retell them for the 21st century."

"Border Crossings – Then and Now in the Welsh Marches" is published by Grosvenor House Publications and costs £12.99.