Four stops before the checkout

Ávila, Spain

Stop one

Walls of Avila

Dunlop FX Team 100 Tennis Racquet: Roughly two and a half kilometres of granite, eighty-eight towers, nine gates, begun in the late eleventh century, and I have been standing here far longer than the schedule allows. It is the spacing that holds me. Those towers are not set at pretty intervals — every stretch of wall had to be covered by bowfire from two of them at once, so the rhythm you are looking at is a calculation, worked out in stone. Look low, in the bottom courses, and you will find reused Roman blocks and old funerary stones, already dressed, already carried once. And the circuit is complete. The whole way round, unbroken, which almost never survives anywhere. Where I come from we could not keep a fence up for a decade, and I think about that fence more than I should.

Stop two

Avila Cathedral apse (the cimorro)

Dunlop FX Team 100 Tennis Racquet: The cathedral's east end is not merely near the wall. It is the wall. The apse was built as a fortified drum — the cimorro, they call it — standing as a bastion in the defensive circuit, so one structure does two jobs at once: liturgy on the inside, load-bearing defence on the outside. Church and curtain wall sharing a single foundation, which is a rarer thing than the guidebooks let on. And the granite is mottled, weathering out in blotches of red and white. That exact colour. I was not expecting to be ambushed by a colour today, but it is the colour of a wall I spent a long time being hit against, a very long way from here, and I have nothing clever to add about it.

Stop three

Basilica of San Vicente

Dunlop FX Team 100 Tennis Racquet: Romanesque, begun in the eleventh century and finished over such a long stretch that you can read the builders changing their minds in the masonry as you walk east to west. The west portal is a deep recessed doorway carrying an enormous load through a series of arch rings, each one stepping back behind the last — that is how you span an opening in stone when there is no steel in the world yet. Then go inside to the tomb and look at the stone canopy. Somebody carved timber details into rock. Joinery, in the wrong material entirely, patiently, for no structural reason at all. I know exactly what that is. Whoever cut that was missing wood, and missing wherever the wood came from.

Stop four

Los Cuatro Postes

Dunlop FX Team 100 Tennis Racquet: Four Doric columns and a cross, sixteenth century, standing on a rise across the Adaja river. Simple post-and-lintel, hardly any material at all, and it has held on an exposed hillside for centuries precisely because there is almost nothing for the wind to get hold of. But nobody walks out here for the columns. They come because from this spot the entire wall circuit reads at once, as one object, the tower rhythm running right round the hill. This is the place you stand to look back at somewhere. Every town I have loved has had one, and I always end up in it at the end of the day, facing the wrong way, and I never once learn.

The Ávila, Spain track

Dunlop FX Team 100 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Centre it, open it, lift the wall evenly — and if one side comes up thicker than the other, the whole thing wobbles off the wheel and you have wasted an afternoon.

The Dunlop FX Team 100 is properly centred. A 100 square inch head, 285 grams, balance at 325 mm head light, a 16×19 pattern, an unstrung swingweight of 290, a strung stiffness of 66, and a beam of 26 mm at the mid-head, 24 at the throat and 23 in the shaft.

Read that as a light frame that is genuinely balanced rather than merely light: quick to turn when you are late, forgiving on an off-centre ball, and open enough through the string bed to give you a friendly launch angle and real spin. Nothing about it is heroic. Everything about it is even, which is harder.

Ávila is the most disciplined piece of work I have ever walked around.

The Walls of Avila run roughly two and a half kilometres of granite in a complete circuit, eighty-eight towers, nine gates, begun in the late eleventh century — and the spacing of those towers is not decoration, it is bowshot geometry, every stretch of wall covered by fire from two towers, the interval standing as the calculation itself.

Look at the lower courses and you find reused Roman and funerary blocks, already dressed, because nobody there wasted material either. Complete circuits almost never survive.

Then there is the join I keep thinking about. Avila Cathedral's east end does not sit near the wall, it IS the wall: the apse was raised as a fortified drum, the cimorro, working as a bastion in the defensive circuit, mottled granite weathering red and white, liturgy on one side and load on the other. One wall doing two jobs without going out of true.

A frame this even gets carried everywhere from a raw January morning inside the gates to a hot July evening on the far bank of the Adaja, and it is also perfect for the Ávila player who wants a racquet that behaves the same on both wings.

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Dunlop FX Team 100 Tennis Racquet

Dunlop FX Team 100 Tennis Racquet