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Stories

Long-form reporting from the road, told through the people met along it.

The volunteers who answer the Cornish coast

The volunteers who answer the Cornish coast

The RNLI's lifeboat crews have launched to ships in trouble from Cornwall's coast since the institution was founded in 1824, and the crews are still overwhelmingly volunteers: fishermen, teachers, and builders with pagers on their belts.

The salt fields of Guerande are still worked by hand

The salt fields of Guerande are still worked by hand

On the Guerande peninsula north of the Loire estuary, some four hundred paludiers harvest sea salt from clay basins laid out in the Middle Ages, in a cooperative trade whose rules would be recognizable to their medieval predecessors.

The salt that still leaves the mountain at Hallstatt

The salt that still leaves the mountain at Hallstatt

Salt has been mined above Hallstatt for some seven thousand years, the Iron Age that bears the village's name was financed by it, and a brine pipeline built in 1607 still runs the mountain's product to the works at Ebensee.

Who lights London's last gas lamps

Who lights London's last gas lamps

Roughly 1,500 gas lamps still burn in London, most of them in Westminster and the Royal Parks, and a small corps of employed lamplighters keeps the flames lit in a trade that once ran on whole families.

The villages that bank hours instead of money

The villages that bank hours instead of money

Time banks, the mutual-credit systems where an hour of help earns an hour of help, began as an American legal scholar's idea in the 1980s and now keep rural communities across Europe and Japan functioning.

The seanchai's chair by the pub fire

The seanchai's chair by the pub fire

Ireland's storytelling pubs carry on the work of the seanchai, the traditional bearer of lore, in an unbroken line that runs from fireside houses through the folklore collections of the 1930s to the back rooms where a tale still earns its silence.