Steve Pill

The First World War ended on 11 November 1918. Much of the fighting had taken place in Western Europe, ravaging otherwise picturesque countryside. One of the few flowers to thrive in this environment was the red Flanders poppy, native to its namesake part of northern Belgium. It was the Canadian military surgeon Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae who observed the symbolism of the poppy when he penned In Flanders Fields as a tribute to a friend lost in the Second Battle of Ypres.

For a small country, Wales is rich in beauty and in stories. From the proliferation of castles to its myth-filled mountains, from its patron saint, St David, who caused a hill to rise beneath him as he spoke to his followers, to the huge red dragon on its flag, one doesn’t need to know much about Wales to suspect it might have a story or two up its sleeve.

If Westminster Abbey were in almost any other place in the world, it would rightly be the focus of every tourist’s smartphone camera. It is, after all, one of the world’s greatest churches, a Gothic masterpiece with a history stretching back more than a millennia. Yet the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster (to give it its formal title) sits across Abingdon Street from the Houses of Parliament, so it finds itself both literally and metaphorically in the shadow of Big Ben.