01
Stop one
Great Mosque of Taza
Solinco Heaven Strings Barb Wire 16g Tennis String Set: Before the building, the ground. This medina sits on the lip of the Taza Gap, the corridor between the Rif and the Middle Atlas, and every human decision here is downstream of that gap. Fine. The humans. Abd al-Mu'min, Almohad caliph, founded this mosque around 1142, when Taza was the movement's first stronghold outside the High Atlas on the march to empire. The Marinids enlarged it 1292-94 and left the inlaid wooden minbar and that pierced bronze chandelier of about 1294 — three tonnes of arabesque and inscription, finest metalwork in the Islamic west. Nine centuries of prayer. Also, those green tiles are doing something remarkable with this light.
02
Stop two
Bab er-Rih
Solinco Heaven Strings Barb Wire 16g Tennis String Set: Now this one I enjoy. Bab er-Rih, the Gate of the Wind, where the walls run out to the cliff edge and the air funnelled through the Taza Gap comes up over the rampart at you. Stand still. Let it work. The gap itself is the seam between the Rif and the Middle Atlas, which is precisely why the history is so relentless: Almohad walls in the twelfth century, then Marinid, Saadian and Alaouite hands strengthening them, because whoever held Taza held the road to Fez. Sultans, pretenders, campaigns launched from this platform. Meanwhile something is riding the updraft out over the plains and I would rather watch that.
03
Stop three
Andalusian Mosque of Taza
Solinco Heaven Strings Barb Wire 16g Tennis String Set: Uphill, tight lanes, barely a strip of sky — and every so often one stubborn tree wedged between two walls, which tells you more about the water table than I can. The mosque: twelfth century, and its name carries the Andalusi migrants, refugees and settlers out of Muslim Spain who enriched the cities of northern Morocco. The minaret is austere early Almohad, raised in a city Abd al-Mu'min had made a base for the conquest, serving the quarters climbing inside the new walls. Through the Marinid centuries Taza's scholars kept a modest provincial version of the learning of Fez, up the road through the gap. Still in use.
04
Stop four
Saadian Bastion (Borj)
Solinco Heaven Strings Barb Wire 16g Tennis String Set: Look at the masonry — stone and rubble, quarried from country that has been folding and faulting since long before anyone thought to build on it, and it will outlast the argument it was built for. That argument: Ahmad al-Mansur, Saadian sultan, threw up this bastion at the end of the sixteenth century, the gunpowder age arriving in Morocco. Thick, round, artillery-bearing European design bolted onto the medieval Almohad walls, facing east because Ottoman Algiers was out there. Al-Mansur won the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578 and built El Badi; he knew engineering. Cannon platform, casemates, the eastern gate held from the Almohads to the French conquest of 1914. Fine olive country below, incidentally.
Hold out your arm. Steady — she can feel hesitation through the glove. Now watch how she works, because the Solinco Barb Wire 16g set hunts exactly like my bird. It's a co-polyester with a square profile — four edges, sharp as a raptor's silhouette — and then Solinco twists it along its axis, so the surface comes out ridged and rough, feathered for grip.
When it meets the ball, that barbed texture sinks into the felt like talons into a lure and wrings out heavy, violent spin. The ball climbs, stalls, and stoops — drops onto the line like a falcon out of the sun. The prey never sees it coming. They rarely do.
The field notes, kept as carefully as my mews: 16 gauge, 1.30mm — the durable end of the Barb Wire line, bred for full-blooded swings, session after session. One 40-foot (12.2m) set rigs one racquet. The plumage is black, the temperament firm, controlled, spin-first. A working animal, not a pet.
My perch is Taza, Morocco — a fortress city on the cliff edge of the Taza Gap, the great wind corridor between the Rif and the Middle Atlas, where the thermals rise off the plains and a bird can hang motionless over a thousand years of ramparts. You'll fly this string everywhere from a dawn session below the medina walls to an evening hit as the gap winds pick up.
It is also perfect for the airless afternoons down on the Taza plain, where the wind dies and the ball has to be hunted rather than handed to you. Afterwards, refuel like a local with mint tea poured from height. Highest pour wins. That's not official. But it's true.
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