The finer things

EVERY old river city, from Bergen to Bristol, from Hamburg to Cork, wears its past like a beautiful necklace.

Sometimes it’s like a necklace worn by an impoverished dowager wondering whether her life or her resources will run out first. It tells of what is, once was and might be again.

In these trading cities a collar of old houses, as proud as an Elizabethan ruff, dots the heights along the estuaries overlooking rivers still defiantly, surprisingly beautiful despite the indignities inflicted on them.