Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Non Fiction, Places, Travel
Number of pages: 300
ISBN: 9781781720844
Publication date: September 17, 2013
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Non Fiction, Places, Travel
Number of pages: 300
ISBN: 9781781720868
Publication date: September 17, 2013
Price: £9.99
In the Middle Ages the port of Cardiff stretched from Chepstow to Gower. Peter Finch, archetypal Cardiffian, sets out to explore his heritage, walking the Welsh side of the Severn Estuary and reclaiming his personal memories in addition to discovering the lives of others. And with a detour to Maismore, the highest tidal point of the estuary, he walks the English side too, taking in the differences with Wales, reviving past links and looking at his homeland from abroad.
On his journey he sees the estuary as border, a highway for trade and ideas, an industrial zone, and a place where people spend their leisure. Rich in anecdote, evocative in description, Edging the Estuary takes in villages and cities, power stations and fishermen, castles and caravans, leg-aching walks and deckchairs on the beach. The tragedy of Lynmouth, the competing delights of Porthcawl, Barry and Weston-super-Mare, the industrial sites of Usk and Port Talbot, the fate of Cardiff, Newport and Swansea docks, the ancient trackways of Swansea Bay and the Star Inn at Neath are just some of the many stories which punctuate Finch’s epic walk along some of the most beautiful coastline in Britain.
A companion volume to Edging the City, in which Finch walks the Cardiff border.
Peter Finch
Peter Finch is a poet, writer, performer, walker and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff. He has been a publisher, organisation manager, periodical editor, event organiser, literary agent and literary promoter. He was at the forefront of the UK’s small press revolution in the 60s and the 70s with his magazine Second Aeon and pioneered performance poetry in Wales during the 1980s. From 1974 to 1995 he ran the Oriel Bookshop in Cardiff. From 1996 to 2011 he was Chief Executive of Yr Academi Gymreig / The Welsh Academy, an organisation which was later rebranded as Literature Wales.
He specialises in books about the Welsh capital including the successful Real Cardiff series (4 volumes, most recently Real Cardiff: The Flourishing City), Edging The Estuary and its companion Edging The City, and The Roots Of Rock From Cardiff To Mississippi And Back. He has also written books in collaboration with photographer John Briggs: Walking The Valleys and Walking Cardiff.
If Finch is anything from all the above he is also a poet. His numerous poetry titles include Zen Cymru, Useful, Poems for Ghosts, Food and Selected Later Poems and The Machineries of Joy from Seren, Antibodies from Stride, and Vizet, a selected poems in Hungarian from Kronkét Könyvek. Important work from across the last fifty years were brought together in his two volume Collected Poems which was published by Seren in 2022.
