Why this blog?
Hearth and Heart Magazine is my small corner of the Fair Country — a place to think, to write, and to honour the land that shaped me. I grew up in what I call Siluria: South East Wales as it exists in memory, myth, and emotional geography. It’s the region of The Rape of the Fair Country, where the Industrial Revolution was born in fire and iron, and where chapels, coal tips, estuaries, and ridgelines sit side by side like old neighbours who’ve long since stopped trying to impress one another.
Siluria is my home ground and my imaginative compass. Its places — Twmbarlwm, Blaen Bran, Goldcliff, Penarth Head, the Sirhowy and Ebbw valleys — are my personal spiritual waypoints. Not sacred in any formal sense, but they’re where the land speaks most clearly to me. Watchfulness in the north, thresholds in the east, openness in the south, endurance in the west. These moods shape how I see the world and how I write about it.
I’ve been writing since I was a teenager: journals, half‑finished novels, one self‑published book, and a long trail of social‑media reflections. I don’t write about everything. I write about place, spirit, community, politics, and the philosophical tangles that lodge themselves in the mind and refuse to leave. I almost never write about sport or flower arranging. I know my limits.
I’m also an unrepentant armchair philosopher — political and religious — despite growing up in a town where those were precisely the two topics you were meant to avoid in polite company. I’ve never quite managed that. I like ideas, arguments, and the awkward questions that sit underneath everyday life. I’m not an academic; my style is more journalistic than scholarly. But I’ve always been drawn to the deeper structures of belief and behaviour.
I earned an Honours degree in Religious Studies from a Scottish university — a choice I now regard with a kind of bittersweet fondness. Sweet, because it opened my horizons and gave me a grounding in philosophy, history, sociology, and the world’s spiritual traditions. Bitter, because I naïvely believed the old line that “any degree is as good as any other,” which turns out to be the sort of advice only given by people who already have stable careers. My subsidiary subject was Environmental Science — the thing I originally intended to study — before I switched majors at the end of year two. Make of that what you will.
Professionally, I’ve wandered. I trained in the law, practised for a while, and eventually realised it wasn’t the life I wanted. Since then I’ve worked in a range of roles that keep a roof over my family’s head and leave me just enough energy to write. It’s not glamorous, but it’s honest work, and it keeps me grounded.
As for politics: I don’t fit neatly into any camp, but I do have a clear sense of the principles that shape me. I don’t see us as isolated individuals making our way alone; we’re formed by the cultures we inherit, and we owe duties to the people around us. What we have — including the land we live on — is something we hold in trust for our ancestors and for those not yet born. The natural world doesn’t belong to us; we’re just camping here, and the best we can do is live off the surplus without passing it on in worse condition than we found it. That sense of responsibility matters more to me than any party line or ideological label.
Personality tests tell me I’m extremely high in openness and equally high in neuroticism. Which means I’m compelled to create, but always in a state of mild panic. Still, the hearth‑fire needs tending, and this magazine is where I keep it lit.
Hearth and Heart is a work in progress — a blend of essays, reflections, politics, philosophy, and Silurian lore. Old ways, modern reflections. A hearth‑flame held in the Fair Country.
Hearth and Heart Magazine 