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Category / Off-Beat & Little Known

Travelling Modern Europe with a Victorian Railway Guidebook

Are you looking for a way to travel back in time? Well, we haven’t cracked the laws of physics yet, but we have the next best thing – a guidebook from another time. Move over Lonely Planet, Bradshaw’s was one of the original guides that inspired the British to travel the Continent for leisure.  Bradshaw’s…

A Brief Compendium of Places With Secret Passages

It is a well known fact that an underground tunnel connects 10 Downing Street, the British Prime Minister’s residence in London, with number 12 (we’re not sure why number 11 was left out) but it is surprising just how many residences, both old and new, are harbouring hidden passages. Secret doors and passageways have been…

Built in the Clouds, they’re the Highest Villages Frozen in Time

When you’re looking to escape the tedium of modern and mainstream tourism, sometimes the only way is up. Today, our armchair travels will take us to some of the most remote (and highest) villages in the world, from Europe to middle America to Egypt. But of course, we’re not just going to drop you on…

A Journey Down Europe’s Sunken Lanes

Dreaming of getting lost down some pastorally perfect country roads? Much more than a route from A to B, these mysterious ancient pathways hold secrets of their own. To find out what they are, all you have to do is walk towards the light at the end of the lane. Our usual advice to rovers…

The Ghost Bath Houses of Paris

I was researching old Parisian advertisements from the 19th century (as you do) when I came across this one for a palatial Turkish bath house near the opera house. Behind its vaulted arches, magnificent mosaics were lit by stars of coloured glass and according to a 19th century ‘Bather’s Guide’ to Paris, the establishment boasted Roman-Turkish hammams,…

Templar Secrets of Sintra’s Mysterious Initiation Well

Hidden behind a cluster of moss-covered boulders in a Portuguese garden lies a well. It’s no ordinary well, as you’ll see when you push the stone slab that leads you to the top of an inverted tower that plunges into an underworld. With curving arches flanked by ionic columns, lichen and moss-clad stone dripping with…

America’s Last Juke Joints

Before the Juke Box, there was the Juke Joint, a reverberating sanctum of the Mississippi Delta and the indefinable heartbeat of southern African American culture. The traditional Juke Joint seems to have grown out of the landscape more than it was constructed. A ramshackle collection of lost and found, partner to the barrel house and…

The Ruin and Revival of the City that Built America

Some American companies are such a part of our everyday lives, they’re taken for granted, the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google for example. But there is another company that although it can be seen everywhere, no-one notices. Even more mysteriously, the company no longer exists. But walk through any American city, or picture its greatest…

A Brief Guide to Cocktail Hour in Cuba

Picture the scene back in 1937, during the heyday of American jaunts down to Cuba, when the first Pan Am seaplanes regularly took pleasure seekers from Key West to Havana: a group of hard drinking, ex-pat newspapermen are ensconced in the bar of Havana’s grandest hotel, the Nacional, discussing the finer point of sports and…
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