Pigs On The Wing

In late 1979 at the age of 11, I bought my first Pink Floyd record. It was the 7" single "Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2". The record was a huge hit in the United States, reaching number one on Billboard's Hot 100. It was all over the radio and I had to buy a copy to play at home. The song was pulled from the band's album released that same year called The Wall, band leader Roger Waters' semi-autobiographical tale of his journey from fatherless child (his father was killed in World War II) to international rock star and what the journey had done to him.

I had no idea who Pink Floyd was. No clue. I didn't know about their place in rock history or any of their songs or albums. I couldn't have told you if it was one person (which one's Pink?) or a band. I didn't even know they were British until kids asked me (as a recent immigrant to the United States from England) to say or sing "we don't need no education" while I was at school. Completely oblivious. 

I would eventually figure it out. When I was a freshman in college, I watched director Alan Parker's 1982 film adaptation of The Wall album and I was hooked. I'd never seen anything like that movie and I'd never heard anything like the music that was in the film. I got the album on CD for Christmas in 1986, put it on cassette tape and listened to it over and over and over again. And I do mean that. I was relentless. I drove my freshman year roommate crazy with that album. 

That last part was OK. He drove me crazy with other things.

Eventually and quickly, I'd become pretty well obsessed with Pink Floyd. I bought other albums and listened to them with the same fervor and dedication that I applied to The Wall. Dark Side of the Moon. Wish You Were Here. The Final Cut. Meddle. Atom Heart Mother.

One of my favorite Floyd albums was Animals, a five song concept album with a 17-minute long song called "Dogs" on side one. "Sheep" and "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" graced side two to extend the mammalian theme of the album title. The cover art of Animals featured a giant inflatable pig floating above a large brick building with four tall white chimneys. 

That pig was a source of fascination, and the stories about it intrigued me. Apparently, the band brought the pig on tour with them and had it floating around the arenas they played. In the late 1980s, all we could do was read second-hand accounts in books or magazines. There was no internet or treasure trove of pics or videos at fingertip access. The accounts of that pig amounted to something akin to myths or legends. It all added to the mystery about the band. Eventually, I'd see a facsimile of that pig at Roger Waters concerts. I loved it all. All of it. I still love Pink Floyd to this day.

An updated version of the inflatable pig (top left) from Roger Waters' 2022 concert in Washington, DC.

That large brick building with the four tall white chimneys? It's real. It sits on the south bank of the Thames River in London. And since we were in London to see a Tottenham Hotspur match and launch our week plus trip through Wales...time to visit a Pink Floyd album cover.

Considering all the times I've been to London in my life, I'm a little surprised that I have never visited the building that graced the cover of Animals before. I've spent time (and nights) in London in 2014, 2016, 2018, 2024 and way back in the 1990s. And the building was there each time I was there in those years. So sure, it wasn't always open and available to visit like inside the building. But the album cover isn't shot inside. 

So what is this magnificent structure? It's the old Battersea Power Station. It was designed in the art deco style during the 1920s by celebrated British architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and was built in two phases (it's actually a double power station) in the 1930s and 1950s. At its peak, it provided twenty percent of the city of London with power. But in 1983, Battersea was closed, no longer needed as an essential cog of London's electric grid. It would sit vacant for decades.

Then it got bought. Then it got re-opened four years ago as a mixed use development featuring a retail, office and residential program and which included brand new structures around the Power Station as the development's centerpiece.

I don't necessarily expect you to know who Sir Gilbert Giles Scott was but if some context is necessary, he designed both the red telephone booths that used to be all over England and he designed the former power station which is now the Tate Modern Museum in the center of London. He has some legacy.

What that re-development means for the actual Power Station today is that it's a giant shopping mall. I'm serious. But it's a pretty darned handsome shopping mall. 

I'm serious. The exterior shell is intact. The interior art deco detailing that graced the interior spaces in the building are still there in all their glory. And those four tall white chimneys are standing magnificently against the skyline of London. They were actually torn down and re-built starting in 2014, so it's probably a good thing I didn't try to visit Battersea that year.

The program of the mall is centered around the two old turbine halls in the building, multi-story spaces with glass skylights running down the entire length of the halls. They even left the old trussed bridge cranes in place as a tribute to the former function of the building. Those spaces, but particularly the west hall, are spectacular. 

We did not shop. Although we did go to Starbucks.

When they reprogrammed, repurposed, rebuilt and everything else "re" about the building that they did to it over the last 15 years or so, they added something called The Chimney Lift to the building. They took the northwest chimney and made it into a giant elevator (lift in England) that you can ride to the top of in a custom-built mostly glass enclosure. 

THAT is why we had to get inside of the Battersea Power Station on this visit. So sure, the Floyd thing was super important (and we WILL come back to that) and yes, the architecture of the Power Station is just amazing from a number of perspectives but mostly that they would spend this much making a power plant look this good, but it was the Chimney Lift that drew us in. 

And truth be told, we had to go twice. It was our first and last destination of our trip. Our very first stop on this trip after we checked in to our hotel was the Battersea Power Station. The Chimney Lift was broken. And facing a situation with no reliable un-broken time or date, we left. After our time in Wales, we flew back home out of Heathrow Airport so our very last stop on this trip right before we ate our final dinner in London was also the Battersea Power Station. And this time the lift was fixed.

A ride on the Chimney Lift costs about £20. It appears based on a look this week that it's dynamically priced, although honestly, I remember it being a flat rate but maybe that's because we bought in person as walk-ups. Not sure about that.

The experience before the ride takes you through some exhibits and facts about the building and if you are so inclined you can stop and take one or two touch screen quizzes. Then there's some waiting in a waiting area and some more waiting in another spot before you get to climb some steps to the lowest level of the lift. Along the way there are facts and video animations related to the Power Station...the Chimney Lift goes up 109 meters...the building used to burn 10,000 tonnes of coal a week to generate electricity...other stuff.

Yikes on that last one by the way. And a tonne is 2,200 pounds, if you were wondering. A staggering amount of coal.

The time on the Lift itself is about 15 minutes. The view is tremendous and that includes the aerial view of Battersea itself and the other three chimneys. But you have to hustle to take it all in because before very long, you are going to be descending so they can get the next lot of Chimney Lift-ers up to the top of the northwest chimney. I'd never been in that part of London really and certainly not really up in the air (so to speak) so the view was appreciated.

Was it worth it? I'll put it this way...I wanted to go on this ride to feel a deeper connection to a band that I love and I can afford it. Sometimes, things aren't what you expect and that's OK. I think it was worth it for me. But I wouldn't necessarily want to take a family up here, especially if I had no connection (via Pink Floyd or anything else) to the building. Again, the view was awesome; it was just too short. There have been bigger disappointments on vacation before. I'm fine with the Chimney Lift.

Beyond the Chimney Lift, we got a great Pink Floyd story out of our visit. And this counts for a lot.

Maybe I knew this story and I forgot it from some Pink Floyd book I read a long, long time ago, but I swear this is a new story for me. 

As much as the cover of Animals looks like a painting or drawing, it's not. It's a photograph (OK...so actually two photographs combined). That meant the Battersea Power Station actually had a giant inflatable pig floating over it while it was photographed on behalf of Roger Waters and Co. 

The shoot was scheduled for three days in December of 1976 and in case the pig somehow got free (meaning broke loose from its moorings) the band or record label or whoever was coordinating the photography hired a marksman as security for the event. And by that, I mean he was supposed to shoot the pig in case it got loose. 

How anyone thought this was a good idea is beyond me. I mean, bullets that go up have to come down, right? And shooting a rifle at an airborne balloon over the city of London doesn't strike me as a particularly bright thought to me. 

So anyway, on day one of the shoot, the marksman shows up on a perfectly dark and gloomy day but it's too windy to feasibly take a picture of the pig so they just photograph the building. Day two comes around the marksman isn't there. They only hired him for a single day. And sure enough, it's still windy that day and the pig broke loose. Nobody to shoot it down (thank God) so it drifted, cancelling flights at Heathrow Airport to the west of the city and landing in a cow field in Kent.

They did actually manage a picture of the pig on day three, but the sky was apparently a gorgeous blue. So they took the pig from day three and stuck in on the background from day one.

That's what we got out of our trip to the Battersea Power Station. And yes, the pig was named. Algie, if you must know.

Battersea Power Station is really all about the chimneys. That's not really true. But it sort of is.

This is not the first place we've traveled where we visited the site of a Pink Floyd album cover. Although it was the only place we've traveled where we intentionally visited the site of a Pink Floyd album cover.

In 2022, we were in Los Angeles (or more accurately probably greater Los Angeles) on a studio tour of the Warner Brothers property in Burbank when the driver of our tour bus / enhanced golf cart / whatever it was we were riding around in casually mentioned that the view to our right was where the cover of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here album was shot. And sure enough after I got home and compared my hastily shot iPhone picture to the cover of Floyd's 1975 album (and precursor to Animals), he was correct. Not that I really suspected he was not.

Now we've been to two of them. And honestly and completely understanding Pink Floyd's album cover collection, I can't realistically see myself ever getting to the location of a third. And if we somehow found the house where the cover of Ummagumma was shot (if it even still exists) or the field where the cover of Atom Heart Mother was created, I mean why would we even want to? I think two is good enough here. 

That wraps up England and Wales for 2026. Canada up next! Again!

And this is the second post from this trip which takes its title from Pink Floyd's Animals. Enough Floyd. For now.

Come On You Spurs

In 2014, I attended my first football (soccer) match in England ever. Yes, despite living the first 11 years of my life in England and being really pretty into football as a kid as a Liverpool and then Manchester City fan, the first time I set foot in a football stadium was late summer of 2014 in London. We went to see Tottenham Hotspur play Liverpool at the old White Hart Lane stadium. Tottenham lost 3-0, but the seed of my Spurs fandom was planted that day. We had to go back.

It took us 12 years. And it was about under the worst circumstances that we could have possibly imagined. Well...almost the worst. I blogged about that day 12 years ago. I'm blogging about this one too. This does not mean I will blog about every Tottenham match I ever attend.

I have a long and tortured history of supporting underperforming sports teams. Baseball-wise, I'm a Baltimore Orioles fan (last championship 1983). My hockey team is the Hartford Whalers who haven't existed since 1997. I abandoned the New York Knicks in the NBA for the Washington Wizards in 2000 (the Knicks just won the NBA title this year). And after moving to the United States and finding we had moved to a spot pretty much equidistant between the New England Patriots, New York Giants and New York Jets football teams, I picked the Jets. Since then, the Patriots have won six Super Bowls, the Giants have won four and the Jets have yet to make it to one.

On the surface of things, Tottenham Hotspur does not appear to be an underperforming club. They are only one of six teams never to have been relegated from the Premier League which is England's top football league and since that day we watched them lose to Liverpool in 2014, they have finished as runners-up in the Premier League once; have made two Carabao Cup (sometimes called the League Cup) finals and one Champions League Final; and have hoisted the Europa League Cup in 2025. Along the way they have regularly appeared in European competitions which generally means they are finishing towards the top of the league each year.

For the American sports fan maybe not that familiar with English or European football, maybe a few quick explanations about the landscape of English football is in order. 

Promotion and relegation is a system whereby the top bottom few teams in any league swap places with the top few teams in the league below them every year. It punishes underperformance and rewards winning unlike American sports leagues which just keep the same teams in the top league year after year. So in theory, if your team performs poorly enough, it will play in an inferior league the next year. 

The Premier League is the top league in England and it was founded in 1992. Before that the top league was the First Division. Tottenham has never been relegated from the Premier League but it has been relegated in its history which stretches back to 1882.

As opposed to American sports, which generally has one winner of the league per year, there is more than one trophy in play each year for all English Premier League teams. Sure, winning the League is the ultimate goal, but there are two additional domestic cups (the Carabao Cup and the F.A. Cup) and the top teams from the prior season can compete in one of three European cups if they qualify. So the top teams compete for up to four trophies in a single season.

The appoach to the almost brand new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Let's get back to that performance issue, shall we?

Tottenham competed in the top-of-the-top UEFA Champions League this past season but they didn't qualify based on their league position the prior season. They got there by winning the Europa League. Don't get me wrong, winning the Europa League is good but their league position during that same campaign was 17th, one spot above relegation, which is alarming for a team whose finances are among the top ten in the world. They were well clear of 18th place but still...17th is not where the team expected to be. Despite adding a trophy to the trophy cabinet the prior season, changes had to be made.

So this past season they took steps to fix the underperformance. They hired longtime Brentford manager Thomas Frank to lead the team (thanks for the trophy, Ange!) and made a couple of key summer signings. After match week 11 (of 38) the team was in fifth place with a couple of key wins, particularly away at Manchester City, to make the fans feel good. They had also not lost through four Champions League matches.

Amongst all that sort of optimism, we decided we'd make it a point to attend the last Tottenham home match of the season which happened to also be the last match day of the Premier League season. What would be on the line for Spurs? A shot at the Premier League title? Or would it be simply competing for a top spot to play in Europe the following year?

As it turned out...neither of those things were in play. The club sat in 17th place again but this time if they lost and West Ham United won on the last match day, Tottenham would be relegated out of the Premier League. That was the backdrop to our second ever Tottenham Hotspur match.

Pre-match warmups.

There were some obvious differences between our first home Tottenham game 12 years ago and this year's relegation-or-stay-up match. First, ticketing is all electronic and all via the phone. It required us each to buy a club membership for the season but it was still way easier than 2014 when we purchased tickets available at will call that involved standing in a giant line to pick up, killing significant minutes of our vacation by queueing. 

Second, in the last 12 years, the City of London has constructed new overground rail lines and one of them stops right outside Tottenham's home park, which saved the very lengthy walk to and from White Hart Lane the last time we were at a home fixture. 

Third, we are now Tottenham Hotspur fans and know the roster top to bottom from watching them compete (or maybe not so much competing this last year) every week in the Premier League. I came to the match in my brand spanking new Micky Van De Ven kit rather than just wearing a plain, un-numbered and un-named jersey like I did on my first visit. 

But the biggest difference was the stadium. Gone is the 100 plus year old White Hart Lane that we visited last time we were in North London. In it's place (slightly to the north but overlapping the old WLH footprint) is the massive and super impressive custom built Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. No more tight corridors and ramps to get you to the right part of the stadium. Instead, we found ample concourses with food and beverage options in a slightly less roomy version of an American NFL stadium. The Stadium truly is magnficent. It's a testament to the wealth of this club, although it really should be a testament to the success of the club but, well...that whole underperforming thing.

We filed out of the concourse and found our front row, top deck seats just a bit forward on the pitch of the goal at the south end of the stadium in front of the magnificent, towering south stand.

Kickoff!!!

There was one other significant difference. This was a not an early season matchup that in the overall scheme of things may or may not be that meaningful to the club's position in the end of season table. Oh no...this was for a place in the Premier League next year or a spot in the second tier Championship. The place was tense and nervous. You could feel the resolve of the fans and togetherness of purpose for this totally unexpected scenario.

And that togetherness brought forth singing. Lots of singing. 

If there was something we missed in our first Spurs experience, it was the singing. And I believe it was directly related to Liverpool scoring seven minutes into the match and Spurs not really competing much after that, especially after a soft penalty was given (and I do mean GIVEN) to the visitors shortly after halftime.

"Come On Your Spurs". "Glory, Glory, Tottenham Hotspur". "When the Spurs Go Marching In". A chant about Micky Van De Ven set to the tune of "Give It Up" by K.C. and the Sunshine Band. And a well-intentioned often-repeated defense of the neighborhood's Jewish background that the Football Association is trying to get fans to stop chanting because their statement of affirmation happens to contain a racial slur. All of all five of those. Lots of all five of those. Last time at White Hart Lane, we heard far too many Liverpool songs. This time was different.

We sang along. With the first four at least. I read after the match that some of the Everton (our opponent for the day) players put that crowd-generated environment as one of the top three stadium environments in the League. This is what I wanted.

Me and other middle-aged white dudes belting out some Spurs songs.

This whole relegation situation thing had become a significant source of stress as Tottenham have slowly descended in the standings. Gone was new manager Thomas Frank, as was his seven game replacement Igor Tudor before the team finally got serious and hired a third manager of the season (Roberto De Zerbi) who few seemed to really be crazy about the idea, including maybe the team itself.

If the stress of that situation wasn't bad enough, us folks in the east side of the upper deck were frontally assaulted by the setting sun on the hottest May day on record in the United Kingdom ever (it beat the record set the prior day). Bad enough that the day might end up with the team getting relegated for the first time in about 50 years. Now we have to deal with 87 degree weather that feels like 91? Did the singing help this one? Not really. Maybe the tension about relegation but not the heat.

So is Tottenham Hotspur Football Club playing in the Championship next year? No. No they are not. A dominant first half of possession yielded a scrappy goal just before the halftime break and it ended up being good enough to stand up a 1-0 win, securing Premier League status for 2026-27 while sending West Ham United down to the second division. Maybe the last 10 or 15 minutes were a little stressful as Everton made a play for a last minute draw, but even a draw would have secured top flight status for Tottenham next season.

The players applauding the fans.

We survived. Barely. 

Then we saw something we'd never seen in person: the home team players applauding the supporters after the win. This was actually our third English football game (we went to a Crystal Palace home match in 2016) and in both of the prior two occasions the home team had not only lost, but they had failed to even score a goal. This whole experience was gratifying, but this last piece put our day over the top to set us back on our long train ride back to central London and our hotel.

Is this whole 17th place two years in a row thing fixed for Tottenham Hotspur? No clue. They have certainly invested more cash into the team this summer than I can remember the team ever doing, but results (and their ability to hold onto / be patient with a new manager or head coach) are the things that are going to matter, not money laid out during the season break. 

At the end of the match some fans unfurled a large banner that read "Love Tottenham Hate ENIC", a reference to the current ownership of the team which has allowed the club to languish into the situation it is in right now through a combination (more than anything else) of poor leadership, bad decision making and spotty player scouting. Something needs to change soon. The season starts in less than a month so the first results will start pouring in sometime in mid to late August.

For a day in May of 2026, all that didn't matter. We are staying up. Mission accomplished. We'll be back sometime. And I likely won't blog about that one.

Last time we watched Spurs play, I posted a picture of the away stand (in countries outside of the United States fans are not mixed together but are instead allocated home and away sections) with the Liverpool fans still there after the final whistle and most of the stands around them empty of home support. Today, I'm doing the same thing. Can you guess where the Everton fans were sitting? 

The cover photograph of this post is a 1953 painting by L.S. Lowry called Going To The Match. We found it at The Lowry in Salford just outside of Manchester. I thought it would make an apt cover photo to pull in a little bit of our England and Wales trip that I haven't talked about in other blog posts. Lowry was a part of this trip. I'm glad to have included his work here.

Blackbird Singing In The Dead Of Night

Photo post time!

Before our late May trip to the United Kingdom, we'd taken just two very short trips in 2026: a long weekend in northern Arizona and a work-from-hotel most-of-a-week in New Orleans. For each of those trips, I pre-blogged an introduction to what I planned to be two incredible, multi-site birdwatching experiences. I was thinking roadrunners, condors and evening grosbeaks in Arizona and painted buntings, roseate spoonbills and pelicans in New Orleans. I even started one of those two posts with a question if every trip from now on needed a birdwatching post.

They didn't happen. Don't get me wrong, we birdwatched on both trips. But for whatever reason (and truth be told one of the reasons was that the main trail in Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans was closed), we didn't have an incredible birding experience in either spot. So no birdwatching post in Arizona and no birdwatching post in New Orleans. Nature doesn't always cooperate.

That had to change in England and Wales. No way was i going birdwatching away from home on three straight trips without having a treasure trove of bird pictures that I could no way, no how get at home. So I adopted a strategy that I thought could not fail: go birdwatching a lot. Like seven birdwatching excursions in a 16 night trip. It worked!!!

Rose-ringed parakeet, near Wormwood Scrubs, London.

Taking time out of a trip to go birdwatching seven times in a single vacation may seem like a lot, but most of these were either early morning walks or nice-to-haves on our agenda. Meaning we would squeeze them in if we could on an already packed day's schedule. Clearly we did some squeezing, although we had to swap out a couple of spots that were more local to our hotel and likely less productive overall. You can't always get what you want, right? 

Having said that, among the days "climbing" mountains, exploring castles, walking sheep and navigating canals in Wales, we did plan one full day dedicated to birdwatching on Skomer Island. This was our intentional birdwatching splurge on this trip requiring a two hour drive each way (including a "required" 30 minute early arrival time) and a boat trip from the mainland to the island itself. 

Let's start our birdwatching narrative with Skomer.

So what's so great about Skomer? Puffins are what's so great about Skomer. Like 52,000 plus puffins. And yes, I know we've been puffin watching in both Maine (not great) and Scotland (awesome!) in 2021 and 2022 but we can't resist a day seeing puffins. There's no way you can take a bad picture of a puffin. It's just not possible. These birds are so tame. They have no fear whatsoever of humans so it's not unusual to have a puffin land inches from where you are standing and head to their burrows. Or even just stand around right next to you. It is a super, super intimate experience. It took us walking like more than half of Skomer island (the perimeter loop on the island is about 6 kilometers) to find the right spots, but once you get there, it's completely worth it.

Skomer, by the way, is a commitment. You get dropped off in the morning and your return boat is five hours later. So don't get bored after about an hour because you are not coming back to the mainland for a while. There's also no food and limited water and bathrooms on the island. Be prepared with Tesco meal deals or whatever else you need to keep yourself going.

Puffins. No bad pictures. It's not possible. I'm telling you. 

Puffin-wise, I'd put Skomer below Lunga Island in Scotland that we visited in 2022. The puffin population on Lunga, while smaller by far, was more concentrated in a single spot which meant you never missed an awesome opportunity. On Skomer, things were a lot more spread out. More puffins total but over a much bigger area. We were also about three or four weeks later on in the year at Lunga when there was far more puffling-feeding going on and meant puffins flying back from the sea with mouthfuls of sea eels. Not so much of that at Skomer. Still, by the few pictures above, clearly we found some good looks at puffins. 

Where there are puffins on an island, there are inevitablly guillemots (what in the United States we call common murre) and razorbills and for sure there were plenty of those on Skomer as there were on Lunga four years ago. But Skomer's much bigger size and geographical diversity separated itself from our time on Lunga in one significant way: more total bird species. We found a treasure trove of other birds on the island, including sedge warblers, northern wheatears, meadow pipits and a white wagtail, along with a pile of various gull species. 

There are also about 350,000 breeding pairs (not a typo) of manx shearwaters on ths island. That's more than half the worldwide population of manx shearwaters on a single island off the coast of Wales. So did we see a ton of these birds? No, we did not. In fact, we didn't a see a single live manx shearwater during our time on the island because they are nocturnal and live underground. The island is riddled with burrows requiring a strict stay-on-the-path rule on the island, lest we end up crushing a manx shearwater burrow so we felt their presence because it governed where we could go. No winging it and walking wherever we wanted on Skomer. And unfortunately, we did see a number of dead shearwaters on the island.

Trips like the one we took to Skomer may seem like a slam dunk in terms of birdwatching but we actually got super lucky here. We were told on the boat that this was the only day that whole week that passage to Skomer was even possible. 

Skomer birds (top to bottom): razorbills, sedge warbler, meadow pipit, northern wheatear and white wagtail.

OK, so that takes care of Skomer. What else stood out? I'd say Teifi Marshes Nature Reserve about 25 minutes south of Aberaeron (a good there-and-back early morning trip before breakfast was over at our hotel) in Wales and Hyde Park smack dab in the middle of London. We had not great (meaning Welsh on-and-off rain) weather at Teifi Marshes but the place is set up for success, with a number of excellently placed bird blinds and a good mix between wetlands and non-wetlands environments. We were also effectively alone, seeing (if I'm remembering correctly), just two other people in our time there. Hyde Park was totally different. We had awesome weather on that London morning but we also had a lot of company in tourists and joggers everywhere. Hyde Park, though, is stocked full of interesting birds.

I will say that a lot of the value we got out of both places (and other spots we visited) was in birds that are foreign to us but possibly very common to people who live in England and Wales. At both places we geeked out over blue tits, a bird I know as not in any way rare from my time growing up in England in the 1970s. But we don't have them in the United States and they are gorgeous little blue and yellow birds which are a treat to see. We spent a lot of time tracking them in Teifi Marshes and went way off the beaten path in Hyde Park when we sleuthed out a nest in a cavity of a tree. 

I have a feeling that if I lived in central Wales, I could go back to Teifi Marshes a lot. I feel we just scratched the surface of that spot. We saw some birds (like coots and mallards) that we can see locally here in the United States but I think spending some time in those blinds might reveal more than what we saw before breakfast on the day we visited. There were also a lot of trails that we left unexplored and we were there for over an hour.

Teifi Marshes birds (top to bottom): moorhen, grey heron and bullfinch.

I used to be amazed at the kinds of birds you can find in the centers of cities but not any more. We went birdwatching a few years ago in New York's Central Park and found a surprising amount of birdlife. London's Hyde Park was a similar experience. I guess birds have to live somewhere and while most cities have trees sprinkled all over street corners and small squares and parks dotted all over the urban landscape, really large city parks have a tendency to attract multiple species of birds, especially when there are water features. 

Hyde Park was maybe a 10 minute walk from our London hotel to the edge of the Park and entering the Park didn't immediately get us a lot of birds. But our experience definitely improved when we got to the water. Our walk from the north side to the main portion of The Serpentine (which is the largest body of water by far in the Park) in the south made us start to question our decision to visit the Park. But as soon as we hit the water, we saw ducks, swans, plenty of coots and some great crested grebes, a gorgeous waterbird that we haven't really seen many of up close before. It's a treat to find these in an urban environment on vacation (we also found some later in the week in Cardiff's also urban Bute Park).

But Hyde Park kept going and kept revealing more and more birds, including rose-ringed parakeets that are not native but are now definitely resident all over London parks these days. We saw a few elsewhere in London on this trip (picture above) and spent some time looking at them in St. James's Park on our trip to England in 2024.

Hyde Park birds (top to bottom): marsh warbler, grey wagtail, great crested grebe and blue tit.

If these three spots were the stars of our trip, there was a great supporting cast. Wormwood Scrubs in London. Cardiff Bay Wetlands Reserve. Bute Park in Cardiff. RSPB Conwy. We visited all with camera, binoculars and the Merlin app in hand. The quality and quantity of bird sightings at each place varied significantly. We definitely visited at least one at the wrong time of the day but if I know anything about visiting any place wild to see wildlife, it's that a place that seems empty on one day can be the best place you have ever been the next. 

If there was a disappointment in our birdwatching in England and Wales, it was the almost complete lack of birds of prey in our birdwatching trips and the lack of kingfishers, particularly considering how much time we spent next to water. On the raptor side of things, we did manage a look at an eastern buzzard while walking our sheep and we saw plenty of red kites in the skies all over Wales but only when we were driving around the various back roads from one place to the next. On the kingfisher sightings (or lack thereof), Merlin heard one at Teifi Marshes and we may have seen a flash of common kingfisher orange and blue in Cardiff. But those common kingfishers were certainly not common for us.

I won't blow-by-blow the complete bird list we came home with from the UK. But bear with me for three small stories that meant something. 

There are species of birds in the United States and elsewhere in the world that share the same name but which look significantly different than they do in the United States. I guess these three quick stories have that issue in common. 

If there's a signature English backyard bird for me, it's the European robin. It's a small sparrow-ish sized bird with an orange-red patch extending from its face to halfway down its breast. Here in the U.S. our American robins are larger with the orange-red color extending over its entire breast but not up to the face. Robins in England are cuter. They just are. But despite my childhood memories of them, they were not super common in the spots we visited.

But we found one in our time at RSPB Conwy that was utterly unconcerned with our presence and decided to hang out on some branches which were about mid-thigh height for me. We got to within less than six feet of this bird and it would not leave where it was sitting which allowed us to get a signature look at the bird I associate most with England (although admittedly, we were in Wales). These five minute or so looks like this that you get every so very rarely are always super intimate experiences. This one was no exception. It was like watching a puffin.

Next bird named similarly on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean? The goldfinch. We have goldfinches in the United States. They are very, very yellow with black on their wings and head. They are without question gold. European goldfinches look like the picture above. We'd never seen one before this trip. We were a bit astonished at the lack of gold.

For our last intentional birdwatching outing of this trip, we visited Cardiff Bay Wetland Reserve. The weather was terrible. It started out OK but it ended up pouring rain for about 20 minutes and we got soaked. The birdwatching was difficult. The wind before the rain clearly was making birds take cover for the coming rains and at one point I told Sophia that I'd be happy just getting a good picture of a goldfinch out of this trip. Nothing else. Just a goldfinch. And Boom! One landed in a tree right in front of us during a break in the weather when it was sort of sunny. Perfect picture pretty much. So fortunate but so much of photographing wildlife is being in the right place at the exact right time. We were.

I still don't get the gold thing. This is an attractive, interesting bird. I love the deep, deep red on the face and I love the flash of gold on the wing. But goldfinch? I don't know. Not what I would have named it. I assume it was named that before people who named all the birds of the world found the American goldfinch.

Birdwatching often comes with a soundtrack. If there was one bird which was sort of the universal background music for all our time in Wales and England (and not just when we were birding) it was the blackbird. Like robins and goldfinches, we also have blackbirds in the United States but ours locally are either red-winged backbirds (tons in the wetlands and swamps) or rusty blackbirds (which are just not that common). They do not live near our house.

If we heard tweeting in the United Kingdom, almost guaranteed (with a bit of an apology to the wrens in London) it was a blackbird. I just heard a bird! Blackbird. What was that song? Blackbird. That birdsong was really loud and clear! Blackbird.

Because they were so common, I didn't really focus on taking pictures of them until the very last day when I thought that I should have something to remember all the serenading they had done for us for the two weeks we were in country. The above picture is the best I got on our very, very last birdwatching excursion in Cardiff's Bute Park. I'm sure I could have done better if I had tried harder earlier in the week. Blackbirds made part of our experience in England and Wales. Including a picture is super appropriate in this post.

That wraps our England and Wales birdwatching story. I'm not sure we are going to get much in the way of blogworthy birding experiences in our last two significant trips of 2026 and the weather in the D.C. area for at least the next month or two is going to make it rough getting out to see birds for the rest of the summer. But rest assured we will keep going. As I finish writing this post I can hear one of the pair of catbirds that have nested in one of our trees in the back yard just furiously cheeping away. I never knew catbirds were such whistlers until we had a pair living right next to our house. Wildlife continues to reveal surprises which is why we will likely continue to chase it until we are no longer able. That day is hopefully a long, long way away.

The Ring Of Iron

The title of this post sounds scary, right? You have no idea. But only if you are Welsh.

I am fairly confident that growing up and going to school in England until the age of 11 that I studied some sort of English history. Not like detailed complicated stuff in Primary School but something I am sure. But before I started returning back to the country of my birth every two years-ish (no trip during 2020 because of COVID...) starting in 2014, I'm finding that I really didn't understand much about English history at all. And by English history, of course, I mean British history.

Let me take a quick stab at how I would sum up English / British history from the time I was 11 to let's say when I was 46ish.

A long time ago there were Picts and Gaels and Angles and Saxons living on what is now Britain. Eventually they got themselves organized and some how, some way, they decided that someone should be king. Then in 1066, William the Conqueror invaded from France, killed King Harold and took over the throne and thus the entire island of Britain. A couple of centuries later, there was a civil war started by some dude named Oliver Cromwell and that lasted a few years until the crown was restored. After that...the War of the Roses...exploration and colonization all over the world...Queen Victoria...and then we're at the 20th century.

That's it. That's my take on English / British history from when I was 11 and supplemented by absolutely zero learning for the subsequent 35 years or so.

Of course, it's way wrong. I mean, it's not exactly wrong. It's just missing some subtleties. 

Take what is now Wales, for example. And we'll start with William the Conqueror and 1066. 

Edward I, King of England 1272-1307.

When William the Conqueror took over what at that time was England, he established control over as much territory as possible by dividing his newly acquired land among lords that were loyal to him. That strategy allowed him to maintain control over a ton of land without having to secure the area with any sort of National or Crown-provided military force. But he didn't control the entire island of Britain right away. There were local warlords and landowners in charge of their own piece of turf who didn't turn over their lands to the Conqueror as soon as he was crowned. 

And spoiler alert: that situation lasted way beyond the rule of William the Conqueror. Over the centuries there was a ton of small scale, localized fighting and changing of hands of lands. Let's go forward in time about 150 years beyond 1066 and let's focus on Wales. Specifically the north of Wales. Which was decidedly not under the control of the English king at the beginning of the 13th century.

In the early part of the 13th century (so the early 1200s...), much of what is now the north part of Wales was controlled by a Prince named Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (or Llywelyn the Great). By all accounts, he was one of the greatest or maybe THE greatest Prince to have ever ruled the northwest part of Wales which somehow carried the title Prince of Wales. During his rule, Llywelyn managed to transform a territory ruled by lords engulfed in continual civil war into a territory which worked on all levels. He was even officially recognized as the Prince of Wales by the English crown.

But then in 1240, Llywelyn the Great died. And after a brief period where his son, Daffyd, was mostly kind of sort of in charge but then also died, all of Llywelyn the Great's lands and holdings passed to his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. And this is where the end of Welsh independence started. 

Conwy Castle, as seen from the opposite bank of the River Conwy.

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was no Llywelyn ab Iorwerth. He feuded with neighboring lords. He treated his people poorly. He started to call himself the Prince of Wales without endorsement from the King (who was then Edward I). And when Edward I called Llywelyn to Chester to pay homage, he declined the invitation. Now most of these things may seem like small stuff, but the direct snub to the King was pretty bold for the 1200s. And pretty bold to do it to Edward. We'll get to that last part.

Eventually of all Llywelyn's nonsense got to be too much for Edward and he mustered an army and marched on north Wales in 1277. Victory was swift and the resulting Treaty of Aberconwy left Llywelyn in place as a recognized Prince of Wales but with much reduced lands. That defeat and reduction in power really didn't sit well with either Llywelyn or his half brother Daffyd. 

Lots of Llywelyns and Daffyds in this story, I realize. Apologies. It will be over soon.

Five years later, Llywelyn was back at it, this time waging war on neighboring lords in the name of Welsh independence. And this time, Edward had had just about as much as he could take was determined to leave Wales with a different outcome. He marched on Wales again but this time killed Llywelyn (and Daffyd, who ended up with his head on a spike) and kept the land he captured, determined never to deal with Welsh rebellion or skirmishes again. 

To ensure control of the land (and complete subjugation of Wales), Edward decided not to rely on anyone Welsh to hold lands and keep things in order. Nor did he settle on some kind of agent of the Crown to do the same thing. Instead, he relocated a population of English men, women and children into Wales and granted them land and safety. And he constructed a series of ten castles from Howarden and Flint in the northeast down to Aberystwyth and Builth in the southwest. The castles collectively were known as the Ring of Iron and they were there for one purpose: to make sure Wales would never have any illusions about being independent ever again.

I am sure there is a ton of detail missing in my four paragraph description of two wars waged by Edward I on Wales. But I think a little history is important every now and then. Or like maybe all the time.

Caernarfon Castle, as seen from the parking lot.

So, we visited some castles in Wales. Let me say a few words about that because this is not something we would normally do. And this is going to make me sound spoiled.

One of the side effects of traveling so much (I know...poor me...just bear with me here...) is that we end up seeing a lot of the same sorts of things in all sorts of different points on the globe and we start to get numb to the exposure of it all. I don't know how many churches, royal palaces and botanical gardens we have been to over the last 13 years or so but it's a lot. I mean like a ton. So many that we really start to question if we really need to go to another one. I mean how is it going to be any different than the last one or two of five or ten of whatever we happen to be thinking about visiting?

Castles are on this list, although let's face it, this is mostly an issue only in Europe. Since I turned 45, I've been to castles in Germany, Ireland, Scotland and maybe one or two other places and they are all pretty much the same. Big stone walls; no roofs; maybe a moat and a drawbridge; a dungeon sometimes; and maybe a keep or some lawns inside. If there's one place I associate castles with more than any other land, it's Britain. I grew up there in a town with a castle in it, for crying out loud. We can't visit every castle that is near where we are going when we travel. We just can't.

So when I drafted my first list of what we could possibly see in England and Wales, the list had a few castles on it. Seriously? After all that numb-ness, I wanted to visit another castle or two? The answer is yes. Because some of those castles in the Ring of Iron built by Edward I are quite possibly the best that have ever been designed and built on this planet ever. And yes, that sentence deserved two "ever"s. We had to visit some castles in Wales.

The outside walls of Conwy (top) and Caernarfon (bottom).

We picked two. And then added a third. 

When I wrote earlier that Edward I built a series of 10 castles to make up the Ring of Iron, that wasn't exactly true. It would be more accurate to say that he started building 10 castles but some were just never finished, including one of the three that we visited. Castles cost a lot of money, even for kings, and building 10 of these things in quick succession apparently was more than the Crown could afford. 

Four of Edward's 10 castles have been honored with a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. These four today (Harlech, Beaumaris, Caernarfon and Conwy) are largely intact and apparently exhibit outstanding military architecture design courtesy of Edward's castle architect, James of St. George. We selected two of these four to visit, Caernarfon and Conwy, and then added a third in Aberystwyth Castle, which just happened to be there in rainy Aberystwyth and totally free when we were in town. Other than the picture below, I'm skipping Aberystwyth. There's just not much to engage with there.

Some of what's left of Aberystwyth Castle, built after the first of Edward's Wales campaigns.

Both Conwy (1283-1287) and Caernarfon (1283-1330, but never completed) are castles that are attached to a larger city wall. Harlech and Beaumaris are not. We didn't know this before we got there. We just happened to pick two that were a combined castle and attached town in one package. Both the castles and the walls were built by Edward: the castle to hold the royal quarters and those Crown officials needing those sorts of accommodations and the town to hold the English citizens that Edward imported to Wales as part of his plan to crush the spirit of the Welsh.

Generally speaking, the condition of both castles and their attached walls are pretty similar. The perimeter of each of the castles is generally intact, with impressive towers (like lots of towers) at various points around exterior walls. The town wall at Conwy is intact; you can actually walk around the whole of the perimeter as long the town is not performing work on parts of the wall when you are in town like they were in late May of 2026. Caernarfon's walls are a bit less continuous. There are clearly spots which are largely intact, particularly along the west side of the town.

Once you move inside of each castle, the condition of the interior is also pretty similar between the two. There's basically nothing there. Maybe a stone vault or arch here and there but they are way more runied on the inside than the outside. This makes a ton of sense. The interiors of medieval castles didn't need to be made out of stone. The shell was the thing that mattered and stone was expensive. Less durable interors made sense on a number of levels. 

A model showing Caernarfon Castle and the attached town. Very GOT-ish.

The presence of both castles when you are next to them is super impressive. The walls are thick and high and full of murder holes, tiny gaps through which things can be dropped on sieging forces with a very low risk of any retaliation. They are also both sited next to a significant body of water, restricting any sort of land attack. 

If you plan to visit and you want to be fairly comprehensive about your time in these castles, plan on about an hour for Conwy and about twice that for Caernarfon. And by walking the whole thing (or most of each one) you get a sense for how the circulation is or is not tied together. I don't know how many towers there are at Caernarfon but each one seems like it's one way up and one way down and there's nothing joining these things together above absolute ground level. That means a ton of climbing to get up each one. On the day we visited Caernarfon, my step counter on my phone topped out at over 12,000 steps and I'm convinced at least half of those were actual steps climbing and descending the very large and oversized steps in Caernarfon's towers. At the end of two hours, I was done climbing steps. I can't believe people ever could do this in armor.

Of the two castles, I'd go with Conwy as my favorite. I'm half convinced I'm developing some sort of ADD as I age and definitely taking in something that was smaller with fewer spaces to investigate was preferred over massive Caernarfon. I also think if someone asked a random person to draw a castle, there's a good chance that they would produce something close to what Conwy looks like. It's like a cartoon version of a castle but of course, cartoons generally come from the real thing. From across the water, it's just four massive towers with crenellated walls connecting the towers. I love it. 

I also love the approach sequence to Conwy along the town walls. I know this is a very modern approach (I mean it's not like residents of the town on Conwy back in the 1200s would go to the castle for a picnic on a Saturday afternoon or something) but the walk from the parking lot along the old walls getting you closer to this massive medieval fortress with each step definitely builds anticipation for your visit. Of course, you don't enter the castle the way they did back in the day. The original staircase (which is now mostly ruined) to the front door is super steep. The gentle paved ramp is much better for our 21st century physiques. 

The approach to Conwy along the city wall and the interior of the castle today.

There's something else that we got out of our visits to Conwy and Caernarfon: Edward I was one bad dude. And I'm not using bad in a good sense. Bad means bad here.

Maybe it was the time that he was alive. Maybe it was the fact that he was bigger and stronger than pretty much everyone around him (Edward was 6'-2"). Maybe it was the fact that he was personally involved in wars for much of his life (including one of the Crusades to the holy land). Maybe it was because he was the King of England. But Edward I (or Edward Longshanks as he was sometimes known) did not seem like a pretty nice guy.

The historical stories about Edward's fits of rage are a little unbelievable, including him ripping out some of his son's hair from his head and someone else dying in Edward's presence just because Edward was Edward. But there seems to be little debate about the fact that Edward had an unpredictable and fierce temper and was also vindictive. I mean he did put Daffyd ap Gruffudd's head on a spike, but that's not really all he did to that dude. He first had him dragged alive through the streets of Shrewsbury, hanged him, revived him and then disemboweled him and burned his entrails while he was still alive. Of course, all kings might have behaved similarly back then. I'm not sure. 

He also seemed pretty vindictive towards the Welsh. Maybe they deserved it. But the kind of personal revenge he plotted and executed seemed petty. I mean moving in an entire population of loyal subjects just to make sure the locals (who I assume were automatically lower in social status) understood their place is a lot of effort to show someone who's boss. He also removed any sort of notion of there being a Prince of Wales who was actually Welsh. He crowned his own first-born son as the Prince of Wales, making his offspring the first non-native Prince of Wales in history, a tradition which continues to this day to still humiliate the Welsh. And that's outside of the whole mutilation of Daffyd ap Gruffudd's body while he was still alive. 

There is speculation that Edward used the story of the dream of Roman emperor Magnus Maximus as inspiration for the construction of Caernarfon castle. In the legend of Magnus Maximus, who had strong Welsh ties, the emperor dreamed that he met a beautiful princess and when he awoke, sent messengers out to find her while also building a castle to impress her. It is thought that the colored banding on the walls of Caernarfon is deliberately imitative of the walls of Constantinople and that the legend of Maximus' dream was a source of inspiration. World leaders using emperors from past and long dead empires as a source of real inspiration to guide decisions in an era far removed from those times? Sounds like crazy stuff to me. Or maybe it happens often. Who knows? 

The interior of Caernarfon and a view of the town wall from one of the Castle's towers.

These two impenetrable fortresses that Edward built that we visited by the way? Both captured by the Welsh.

OK, so it was really brief in one case. 

Caernarfon Castle was captured by Welsh rebel leader Madog ap Llwelyn in 1294 and held for a year. How awesome a name is Madog, by the way and I promise that's the last Llwelyn in this post. 

At Conwy in 1401, two Welshmen disguised themselves as carpenters convinced the guards to let them in while everyone who would usually be inside the Castle was at Good Friday services. The two "carpenters" then killed the guards and held the castle for 15 days before a surrender was negotiated. 

Were Conwy and Caenarfon worth keeping on our agenda despite our (probably snobbish) aversion to visiting castles? Probably. I'm glad we went, particularly to Conwy. Does that mean all castles are back on future agendas? Umm...no. There's still a high bar for an intentional castle visit for us, I think. But I definitely feel a little more connected to English / British history. Subtleties, I'm telling you. 

The original (now ruined) entrance to Conwy Castle.