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Tell us about your favourite adventure travel break in Europe – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

Adventure means different things to different people. For some, it means overcoming a challenge such as climbing a mountain or a long-distance bike ride. For others, it’s about pushing themselves out of their comfort zone – travelling solo, perhaps, or heading out into the unknown on a road or rail trip with no fixed destination or itinerary. However you define it, we’d love to hear about your adventures – the trips that challenged you and took you somewhere new.

If you have a relevant photo, do send it in – but it’s your words that will be judged for the competition.

The late poet laureate’s hymn to the commuter towns of Middlesex, Herts and Bucks is still a great guide to the Metropolitan line, the world’s first urban ‘underground’ railway

Here is a plan for a day out on the Metropolitan line of London’s underground, although we will at no stage be under ground, and will travel 25 miles from London. First, however, a little history.

In 1863, the Metropolitan Railway (Met) built the first subterranean railway – from Paddington to Farringdon. Five years later, the Met, an ambitious and restless outfit, added to this an above-ground northern prong, from Baker Street to St John’s Wood, in the hope of capturing commuter traffic. As this prong, known as the Extension Line at the time – and still called that by one endearingly affected friend of mine – bifurcated and stretched into Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, the Met built homes adjacent to it in the nostalgic Tudorbethan style. Between 1915 and 1933 (when the Met suffered the indignity of becoming a mere “line” of the London Underground), these were marketed as Metro-land.

Share a tip on how you’ve enjoyed the season in southern Europe, whether you were met with sun, rain or snow. The best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

After the heat and crowds of high summer, southern Europe takes on a new charm out of season. The winter months can be a wonderful time for exploring hiking and biking trails, day trips to cultural sites (minus the queues) and long, lazy lunches. From Portugal to Cyprus, Spain to Slovenia, we’d love to hear about the places you’ve enjoyed visiting in the wintertime.

If you have a relevant photo, do send it in – but it’s your words that will be judged for the competition.

A tourism boom to the North Atlantic islands, fuelled by social media, has resulted in some landowners taking measures to get a share of the revenues

The first snows have fallen on the sharp ridge below the 700-metre summit of Víkartindur. Walking the village path towards Saksun, we looked across to the ridge of peaks that run along the spine of the neighbouring island of Eysturoy. The jagged landscape was bathed in golden winter light and in the distance the Atlantic was a giant silvered mirror.

We saw no one else on the eight-mile walk, just a few white mountain hares darting among the rocks. As it is hunting season, my local guide, Høgni Reistrup, had checked with local farmers that no one would be shooting where we were walking. Hiring a guide makes sense on these steep slopes where the weather is notoriously changeable, and mists can descend quickly.

Our slow travel expert rides a train through a region of lakes and forests which deserves to be far better known

The elegant main railway station in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck is well suited to grand departures, but these are few and far between these days. The only international destination served from Lübeck is Szczecin, in Poland. Half a dozen daily trains ply a meandering route through sparsely populated terrain on a 185-mile journey that starts in Holstein and then crosses Mecklenburg to reach Pomerania. It is a region where, historically, Prussia and Sweden vied for supremacy. Today it’s a chance to see off-the-beaten-track communities in a remote part of eastern Germany.

I start my journey by Lübeck’s celebrated Holstentor: it’s an extraordinary mid-15th-century city gate and sets the scene for the journey east towards Poland. The rail route from Lübeck to Szczecin is known as the Stadttore-Linie (the Town Gates Route). Several places along it boast fine examples of defensive gates, most of them in an architectural style found across the Baltic region. It’s called by the German name Backsteingotik (brick gothic).

There’s so much to see in and around Lincolnshire and Leicestershire this Christmas – from nature reserves to medieval towns – and it can all be done without a car

The eight milkmaids have had a knees-up in the Elizabeth Salon – at least it looks that way – leaving a pastel-coloured tower of pails, cows, and three-legged stools under the ornate painted ceiling. Next door, seven sculptural swans are swimming through an elaborate silver centrepiece above a grand banqueting table, while six lifesize geese have laid Fabergé-style eggs in sparkling bullrush-fringed nests.

Charlotte Lloyd Webber, who decorates Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland, and Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, has created a splendidly theatrical 12 Days of Christmas here at Belvoir (pronounced “beaver”) Castle. The display features more than 100 trees and thousands of baubles; the five gold rings take the form of a big kinetic sculpture, twirling above Belvoir’s remarkable art collection (from £10/£19 for children/adults, belvoircastle.com).

The notorious pavé leaves this rider shaken and stirred, but the the gorgeous scenery of Belgium’s cycling heartland more than makes up for it

The Belgians love their cycling, but the Flemish worship it. The Flanders half of Belgium is laced with dedicated cycle routes carefully delineated and signposted. Whole towns close for road races. Bike sculptures lurk in fields. Posters of famous riders pepper high streets. Cycling runs deep in the culture here: that background hum you can hear? It’s the ceaseless whirr of oiled chain on metal cog.

As a result, cyclists from this part of the world, dubbed Flandriens, are deemed among the toughest on the planet thanks to their years of endurance in the wind and rain that tears across this open, flat country during the chill months, and for their ability to stay upright on the painful, treacherous cobbles.

What’s better than a winter pub lunch? Staying the night afterwards. Our pick includes coaching inns, a 12th-century abbey and a Game of Thrones hotspot

Fireside lunches in cheerful pubs are one of the great pleasures of the UK winter, and this score of snug venues all come with somewhere to stay as well as cobweb-clearing walks from the door.

A hike in Bowland fell country is the perfect starter to a feast of award-winning modern British classics in a rural inn

here are two ways for a walker to work up an appetite. Tramp over moorland and collapse into a pub to scarf a pile of carbs. Or do a gentle pastoral ramble, so you have enough energy to appreciate the awaiting food. As my Bowland outing was going to conclude at the Parkers Arms – the UK’s no 1 gastropub, its 12^th best restaurant and gold medallist at the British Pie Awards – I tried the easy option. That walk can be found here. It’s a pleasant, well-trodden route but, frankly, lazy. How can you justify a full-on feast without burning off a few calories?

So I thought again and decided to include Easington Fell, the handsome hill that presides over the villages of Newton and Slaidburn. I started at the latter, because I’d chosen it as the place to spend the night, and because it’s a pretty little place. It sits on a curve in the River Hodder that’s known as Jam Pot Corner because that was the name of the teashop that used to sell day-passes to anglers; a fly-fisherman was working the beat when I passed. It’s home to a YHA in what used to be the Black Bull pub, a busy local history archive – you’ll see old clogs in the window display – and the Hark to Bounty, a coaching inn that has been here since the 16^th century.

Cosy nooks and ancient wooden beams are the backdrop for our tipsters’ pick of proper boozers serving good pub grub

Last November, a group of us took a trip to the Peak District for my dad’s 60th. We booked the Packhorse Inn in Little Longstone for the celebratory dinner, just off the famous Monsal Trail. The pub sources all its produce locally and changes its menu monthly. When we arrived, we were welcomed with roaring fires and delights on the menu such as pork belly with black pudding and mustard mash, game pie, and a top tier sticky toffee pudding. It was worth it, although we ended up having to navigate a muddy walk home afterwards through cow fields in complete darkness.
Eloise

Diversity was the watchword at this year’s gathering of outdoors lovers in Cumbria, with all races, sizes and abilities celebrated

Frustration at the lack of plus-size outdoor clothing and a feeling that people her size are unwelcome in the outdoors led Steph Wetherell to launch Every Body Outdoors last year.

The Instagram page she set up with four women whom she’d met online clocked up 1,000 followers in its first 24 hours. “We realised there were so many larger-bodied people who didn’t feel comfortable in the outdoor space – they’d had bad experiences perhaps, or struggled to find suitable gear. We wanted to create a community to show that people of all sizes can enjoy outdoor activities, from cycling to swimming, hiking or climbing. There’s a lot of us out there.”

Dungannon, Burnley, Barrow-in-Furness, Harlow and Merthyr Tydfil may not be quaint, but these robust centres have a poetry that’s all their own

part one | part two | part three | part four | part five

Type the names of many ordinary towns into Google followed by “is” and the search engine often autocompletes with “a dump”. The predictive text becomes self-perpetuating as people click on the link, through curiosity or accident. Local newspapers abet negativity with regurgitations of “worst places to live” rankings from surveys commissioned by dubious sources trying to grab attention in the digital media morass. The five towns featured below have surfaced on such lists, but ugliness has as many forms as beauty, as Dylan Thomas hinted at when he called Swansea “an ugly, lovely town”. Both adjectives can be simultaneously true. The ugliest place in England for me is Belgravia, London, where monotonous facades and security cameras sneer down at empty pavements. I think Belgravia “is a dump”. But I’d still go there to see it, understand it, know it.

Serbia’s ‘tavernas’ are fusing traditional food and drink with new cuisines and rousing live music as they evolve to attract a younger crowd

I’m in a good old-fashioned pub, drinking beer over wooden tables and tucking into a hearty meal. Except the wooden tabletops are covered in red checked cloths, the decor is Balkan folk.

Instead of a roast I’m diving into a pile of minced beef sausages called ćevapi and imbibing shots of rakia, the local plum brandy. An accordion player draws musical breaths in a corner, his companion strikes Gypsy tunes from a fiddle, people dance on tables. Welcome to the kafana.

The champagne houses of Épernay and Rheims produce some of the finest fizz in the world, but if you know where to look, there are bargains to be had

Forgive me for sounding a little smug. You would too if you were sitting in stylish lodgings sipping a glass of grand cru minutes away from a prestigious address, the Avenue de Champagne in Épernay, east of Paris. The mile-long avenue is lined with expensive champagne houses, from Moët & Chandon to Perrier-Jouët.

But instead of forking out a fortune, I’m indulging my champagne taste on a prosecco budget. That glass of top quality grand cru? It’s from a half bottle I picked up at the independent producer Mouligneaux-Gourdain for €10 (£8.70).

Walking with snowmen, skating with penguins … get festive with our top 10 days out for children

With the majestic domes of the Royal Pavilion as its backdrop – lit in magical neon colours if you go after dark – this real ice rink is a popular highlight of Brighton’s yuletide offering, and the only one in the UK powered by renewable energy. Families are warmly welcomed, with penguin skate aids available for £5 and a beginners’ rink where young skaters can safely build confidence on the ice. Rinkside, a covered bar and café and outdoor terraced areas offer mulled wine, mince pies, cakes, snacks and a decent children’s menu – and a great place to sit and watch if you don’t want to risk the ice yourself.
Adults and children aged 12 and over £18, concessions £15, 12 and under £14, royalpavilionicerink.co.uk; family room, B&B, from £179, queenshotelbrighton.com

The Finnish-style Hotbox is making waves on Benone Strand but Ireland has its own tradition of therapeutic ‘sweathouses’. Plus six more stylish beach saunas, from Shetland to Sussex

It’s a late-October afternoon at Benone Strand on the Causeway Coast in County Derry, and the low sun is collapsing between wedges of dense cloud. There’s empty beach as far as the eye can see, apart from the odd horse-rider galloping through the shallows. My boyfriend and I are in swim shorts on the hard sand, despite the temperature being in single figures. But we’re not shivering. Not at all. We’ve just boiled our bones in the Finnish-style Hotbox sauna perched at the water’s edge.

We sprint into the sea to cool off and a shriek or two later are back inside to restart the hot-cold cycle, our hearts pumping as we take a seat on the wooden bench. As I ladle water on to the stones for a satisfying sizzle, the sauna’s rectangular window affords a mesmerising framed view of the waves, the horizon and the darkening sky. This juxtaposition is powerful: an instant hit of happiness.

Vinyl Pimp, in Hackney, east London, offers free night in warehouse to a guest spending £250 or more on records

“Most of the guests are a little twitchy when it comes to checkout because they haven’t slept,” says Valentine Comar. The French DJ is standing between towers of shelving that house more than 27,000 records at her workplace – the UK’s only “vinyl hotel”.

The one-room lodging offers a unique proposition: a free night’s stay at an east London warehouse stocked with every genre of music, on the condition that a guest spends £250 or more on records (and a further £100 for each extra guest).

A powerful documentary about the Baltic state’s sauna tradition has proved a surprise hit. But what’s it like for an outsider to join this sacred and intimate space?

“We are your sauna sisters now. Tell us what you’re afraid of.” The three women I have just met eye me expectantly. “Er, I wouldn’t say I’m afraid, exactly, more apprehensive about how hot the sauna will be, and how cold the water is …”

I’m at Mooska Farm in Võru county, south-east Estonia, to try a traditional smoke sauna. The earliest written records of Estonian saunas date from the 13th century, and the country’s smoke sauna culture was added to Unesco’s cultural heritage list in 2014 (many think of Finland as the home of sauna, but its sauna culture wasn’t listed until 2020.) This year, the smoke sauna has come to international prominence thanks to Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, an astonishing documentary that won a directing award at the Sundance festival and is Estonia’s entry for the Oscars.

Sauna shacks on beaches and lavish spas in luxuriant grounds are among our tipsters’ pick of places to unwind, everywhere from Albania to the Irish Sea

We were staying on the Cowal peninsula in October and took a scenic drive down to Portavadie, where there is a heated outdoor infinity pool, sauna, steam room and treatments. We had a lovely time not only because of the water but the wonderful views out across Loch Fyne. Prices start at £8 for a public swim, which includes indoor pool/whirlpool bath for 90 minutes. This was a fabulous find well worth the trip. We will return and stay to enjoy the spa, accommodation, restaurant, scenery and walks.
Karen Prosser

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon biopic is released next week, but from birthplace to battlefields you can still follow in Bonaparte’s mighty footsteps

Napoleon was born in Ajaccio on 15 August 1769, the year the French took back Corsica from the Genoese and just a few months after the birth of Arthur Wellesley – later the 1st Duke of Wellington – in Dublin.

Once the site of legendary parties, the Intercontinental in Kabul is still a potent symbol of who rules Afghanistan – and what its future might hold

From Santa Specials for excited children to a luxury Yuletide Evening Express for the grownups, these colourful trips will get you into the festive spirit

There’s an affinity between trains and Christmas, but what precisely is the connection? Ghostliness comes into it – the mystique of a train in the wintry night. I think of the misty, hypnotic adaptation of Dickens’s story The Signalman, in 1976, part of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas strand; or the ghost story in the Christmas number of the Railway magazine (that publication’s only excursion into whimsicality is always worth reading).

Prof Paul Salveson, founder of the Community Rail movement, has written some excellent railway ghost stories, but he thinks the more profound connection is that “trains bring us home to our loved ones, and they have a sense of warmth and comfort that cars don’t have”. He recalls, from the 1960s, “lots of “Christmas extras” taking hundreds of people home, to and from Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, often through snow-swept Pennine landscapes. Salveson finds an echo of that Christmas warmth in some stations today: for example, Paddington, with its Friday night brass band.

Employment applications are already the height of awkward self-promotion. And some claims about Hilton Australia’s new hiring strategy are unhinged

• Post TikToks not CVs, Hilton Australia hotel chain tells jobseekers

Think back to your very first job application. Perhaps you sent an awkwardly worded email to Jay Jays, or awkwardly dropped your CV off at your nearest Sanity, or awkwardly cold called Muffin Break and hung up just as the awkward 16-year-old shift supervisor answered the phone.

Now what if you could take that experience, and make it … public? While also creating free publicity for the company you’re applying to?

If you think this sounds like an incredible idea, there’s at least one company that agrees: Hilton, which is doing basically this in Australia, pitched as a bold new age for hospitality hiring.

Recruiters at @hiremehiltonau target gen Z workers – but say they will accept written résumés too

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The Hilton hotel chain is encouraging jobseekers to ditch conventional résumés when applying for a role – and to post a TikTok instead.

Hilton shared a video on its TikTok account @hiremehiltonau labelled “recruitment process at Hilton”, with the accompanying caption saying: “Looking for a job with #hilton? ​​#tiktokresume #hospitalitylife #hiremehilton.”

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Giant relics from previous centuries, a restoration effort and our writer’s childhood memories loom large on this hike along Britain’s first modern canal

I hadn’t planned my walk along the Sankey Canal to coincide with the axing of HS2 but it happened like that. It was a sunny day. I had been promising myself a hike along the towpath for ages. I grew up in the area and it holds a special place in my affections. As I wandered it struck me that this under-explored waterway was arguably the UK’s first significant development in infrastructure since the Romans built roads. It was built in two years.

The Sankey Canal connects St Helens with the River Mersey. It was opened in 1757 and subsequently extended to Widnes. Large sailing barges called Mersey flats moved coal from Lancashire to the Cheshire salt-brining towns and to Liverpool. The first canal of the Industrial Revolution built in Great Britain (Northern Ireland’s Newry Canal was earlier), its construction was only permitted because engineer Henry Berry and financier John Ashton duped parliament and other investors into believing it was a “navigation” – a widening of the existing Sankey Brook. But it is a true cut, and prompted the Duke of Bridgewater – the “father of British inland navigation” – to build his own waterway.

Harrison Ward, better known as Fell Foodie, began cooking elaborate meals on mountain summits as a way to improve his mental health. Now he’s sharing his recipes in a cookbook

The amber, auburn and crimson colours of autumn cosy up on top of one another, each layer dotted with patches of green, waving gently in the wind. This description is not one of the Lake District landscape before me, though it does match those views. Rather, it’s of the cabbage and butternut squash sabzi that’s just been handed to me by Harrison Ward on the summit of Black Fell – cooked on a camping stove with red onion, diced garlic and ginger, ½ teaspoon nutmeg, ½ teaspoon turmeric, accompanied by a freshly made flatbread and topped with coriander.

Better known to many as Fell Foodie, Harrison is an Ambleside local who has acquired a substantial Instagram following for cooking up extravagant meals on the fells. “I’ve always loved that mindful experience of crafting a meal and sharing food with people,” he says. “Food plays a huge part in my own life, so why go outdoors and leave that passion behind?”

For a limited period, architecture lovers can spend the night in a modernist masterpiece designed by Alvar Aalto

Deep in a forest two hours’ drive west of Helsinki is the deserted Paimio Sanatorium (Paimion Parantola in Finnish). One of the world’s best-preserved buildings from the modernist era, it’s as clean, sleek and mysterious as a medical instrument.

An overnight stay in a remote, disused hospital may not sound enticing. But for architecture and design enthusiasts, some opportunities are impossible to resist – and this one is time-limited. At least part of this building is likely to be converted into a hotel and spa in the coming years. The Alvar Aalto Foundation, which preserves the legacy of Finland’s most celebrated architect, took over the site three years ago from state ownership, and is searching for a way to pay for its upkeep.

New must-see exhibitions and canalside boutiques and indie stores make the French capital the perfect place for an autumn getaway

The opening of a new hotel, a new gallery and two compelling exhibitions in two of my favourite galleries made a pre-Christmas Eurostar dash to Paris irresistible. The draw of the 91-room Bloom House Hotel & Spa, which opened in September (new beds, new everything equals no bedbugs!), is that you can get off the Eurostar at Gare du Nord after a stress-free journey and be having lunch in their courtyard garden oasis 10 minutes later. A green-tiled pond is the focal point, a pergola strung with festoon lighting overhead – perfect for evening cocktails.

We spent our first afternoon exploring the bobo Canal Saint-Martin, a short walk from Bloom House. The 4.5km canal, which stretches through the 10th and 11th arrondissements down to the Seine, is peppered with indie stores, delis and cafés. Following the Quai de Valmy, we dropped into Antoine & Lili, a set of three shops with a sunflower facade. I swooned over their velvet, just-so flared trousers. More swooning, this time for clothing and curios new and old, in Babel (55 Quai de Valmy), a brocante and déco-cadeaux store a few doors down.

Travel and wildlife writers share their favourite places to revel in the dark of winter

“We,” says the Brocher, face lit by fire and dark with soot, “have creosote in our blood.” In their blood, on their hats, on their boots, down their backs – the Brochers, and in particular the Clavie Crew, have creosote everywhere, except in their whisky. They take that with water, a substance they otherwise disdain as being fine for quenching a thirst but a terrible thing to allow near a bonny flame.