What do you get when you put together the Welsh reputation for musicality and the Irish tradition of a céilí band? The natural desire to compete. At least that’s what it stirred for me, a young musician performing in Wales as part of an annual…

The cluster of rocks known as The Smalls, 20 miles off the coast of south west Wales, was a major shipping hazard, notorious for ferocious rip tides, until 1777 when an unorthodox timber lighthouse structure was erected consisting of nine stout oak…

We may associate seabirds with islands – puffins standing sentinel on ledges, guillemots in serried ranks on slim ledges – but this is only a temporary habitat. On land they are edgy, vulnerable to predation. These are, after all, sea birds and the…