Cultural Geography Blog

A request to cast a vote for Rayburn Tours in the Best School Tour Operator (Large) category of the UK School Travel Awards if you can please, particularly if you have travelled with them with your school.  I work for them in Iceland as a Field Studies Tutor and we are all proud to work for this family firm which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. This would certainly add to the celebrations. The voting form can be accessed here. Thanks very much :)

I'm heading for Iceland again in April, and have made a start on updating my notes for the group I will be taking.  I do this for each group that I take, and also have a chat with the group leader to ensure that I pitch my explanations and talking on the coach (and in situ) correctly. There is plenty of street art in the city of Reykjavik (and of course in other parts of the country). I've added a few images that I've taken below. These are mostly off the street called Laugavegur.  I know roughly where they are, but am going to try to map them and then piece them together to make a nice map. Images: Alan Parkinson Guide to Iceland has produced an illustrated list of their own favourites.  This is not easy to navigate as each icon needs to be clicked on. I've produced a Google Form where you can enter the location of your favourite street art.  If you know the What3Words address that would be an additional extra. The form link is here: It would be good to eventually h...

Cross posting from the LivingGeography blog. I spent five days of the first week of my half term in Iceland.  This introduced me to a couple of new locations which I hadn't visited before - including the car parks and tracks leading to the recent Fagradasfjall lava flows - and also reminded me of a great many that I'd been to previously before the pandemic and I enjoyed experiencing the power of Gullfoss (and the taste of the ice cream at Efstidalur). There had been some changes in tourst infrastructure in familiar locations with others being constructed e.g. a nice new toilet block at Thingvellir for visitors, and new paths etc. I will be working with Rayburn Tours  to lead future tours through 2023 and beyond. I've got a special Iceland blog which will host all the reading and planning I'm doing around these tours, which already hosts the year long 365 blog project which I completed in 2020 (when I was originally going to be visiting four times). On future visits I ...

After the hiatus that was COVID19, I'm pleased to say that I will be heading back to Iceland at the end of October for the first time since before the pandemic.  I had been due to visit three or four times in 2020, but they all had to be cancelled. This also meant missing out on seeing Ben Hennig, who works at the University of Iceland. I am heading there to complete my training as a Field Study Tutor for Rayburn Tours. This means that I've also gone back to adding regular posts to a blog that I put together in 2020 ahead of the original planned visits before COVID19 intervened. This started out as a 365 project, with a post every day for a year, which I managed to complete. I will be directing teachers from the schools that I work with to this as a resource which includes information on a whole range of Icelandic languages and culture. It's called Fieldnotes from Iceland.