Cornwall's Penwith Peninsula:
At the End of England
Cornwalls Penwith Peninsula has what may be the finest coast in all of Britain: forty miles of continuous, unbroken sea cliffs, with sand beaches washed into narrow cuts, and water the deep turquoise of the Bahamas. The wide views from the flat, grassy cliff-tops reveal a landscape twisting every few hundred yards, varying with the underlying rock, carved by the sea into precipitous drops and odd shapes, their colors ranging from grays to reds to deep purples and near-blacks.
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Leeds: Castle of Queens
When Leeds Castle came on the market in 1924, William Randolph Hearst was ready to buy it that is, until he saw it. On paper it seemed to be the perfect opulent party pad. Located just east of London, it was a real royal castle, eight centuries old, yet fully habitable and ready for renovation. We can only imagine Hearst's disappointment when he finally saw it (and promptly nixed the deal). Where are the looming walls? The soaring battlements? The holes for pouring boiling oil on attacking soldiers? Sure, it had a moat (and a darn good one) but . . . what happened to the rest of the castle?
St. Columba's Iona
The tale of Iona — Scotland's holiest island, the resting place of her earliest kings — is also the tale of her founder Columba, the Irish prince and saint. It is a tale of arrogance, of politics, of battle, and of death; and it is a tale of penance, of striving for God, and of peace. It is a tale that may actually be true.
The Search & Rescue Dogs of the Lake District
In the boulder covered slopes of England's Lake District, a body lies under a giant rock, hiding the body from view and blocking its scent from the rescue dogs looking for it. Suddenly, a slender border collie named Mist dashes past the rock, then pauses; she has caught the scent of a human. Within seconds, the dog is sniffing the body, pawing it gently, probing under its tightly curled arms, and finding — a squeaky toy. The body sits up, and they both play the game of Fetch the Squeaky Toy.
Illuminating Blackpool
Just as Karl Marx published his Law of the Increasing Misery of the Working Classes in the mid-19th century, the Midlands working classes started taking vacations. This was completely new and unexpected; never, in the history of mankind, had the ordinary working people had enough money to knock off for a week and go somewhere else. Because this was an absolutely unique event in history there wasn't any place for them to go — so they had to create a place, a pleasure resort just for themselves. That place was Blackpool.
Dover Castle: The View from Hellfire Corner
At its closest point, England is seventeen miles from France. Today this tiny distance hardly separates two close allies, but for most of the preceding twenty centuries the seventeen miles of the Straits of Dover marked a hostile military frontier. In the last five centuries alone, England's enemies attempted invasions on twelve different occasions and made serious preparations at least nine other times. Dover Castle was England's protector, and its secret military tunnels led (and still lead) to a hidden balcony in the cliffs, known during World War II as "Hellfire Corner."
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Islay: Lords of the Isles
Islay, while only eighty miles from Glasgow as the crow flies, is a hundred miles of bad road and a two and a half hour ferry crossing for humans. But remoteness has its virtues — particularly for the home of some of the greatest whiskies and most historic sites in Scotland.
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Dartmoor of the Baskervilles
Conan Doyle wrote
The Hound of the Baskervilles not just as a novel set in Dartmoor, but one with Dartmoor itself as its main character. He would set its wild, open moors, where the Devil and his black dogs hunt for souls, against Sherlock Holme's cold, rational mind.
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The Brontës in the Yorkshire Moors
The scenery around West Yorkshire's Haworth, home of the Brontë sisters, is thick with places associated with
Wuthering Heights and
Jane Eyre.
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Jane Austen's Hampshire
Rural Hampshire was a refuge for Jane Austen; although she lived elsewhere, she wouldn't write elsewhere.
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Izaak Walton's Peaceful World
The Compleat Angler and its author, Izaak Walton, are forever part of the Peaks District's Dovedale, and all the lovely small rivers of England.
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Scotland's Lonely North
Broad views over empty moors and sea cliffs, a few villages, and a main highway that's a single lane wide—it's astonishing that such an empty region could survive in crowded Britain in the 21st century. But there it is.
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Watership Down
A rag-tag band sets out across an alien, hostile landscape, pursued by enemies, their lives threatened at every moment. This could be Allied soldiers behind enemy lines, or hobbits in Middle-Earth. But its not—these are bunnies.
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Doctor Syn: The Romney Marsh of the Scarecrow!
Russell Thorndyke's 1915 blood-curdling penny dreadful
Dr. Syn: The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh tells of a village vicar who rides as a smuggler disguised as a scarecrow—and was himself a pirate captain in hiding! He also tells of Romney Marsh, one of Kent's most unusual regions. For instance, here's a picture of the pub Dr. Syn favored, the way it looked from his rectory window, and still looks today.
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Dartmoor
Rough moors topped by strange granite hoodoos, dangerous mires, and village lanes lined by thatched cottages and grand churches—this is Dartmoor, one of England's oddest and most beautiful corners.
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Whitby
This busy fishing town terraces up Yorkshire's sea cliffs, with a ruinous abbey crowning the clifftop. Its history embraces a Dark Age synod, Viking attacks, Captain Cook, and Victorian jet.
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The Beers of Burton
For more than two centuries, "Burton" meant "beer" in the United Kingdom the way "Hollywood" means "movies" in the United States. Then, suddenly, it stopped. The surprise was akin to the Hollywood studios being bought out by European television stations and moved to Iowa. It was unimaginable—yet it had happened.
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Lancashire's Panopticons
The Panopticons are a public art project meant to highlight both the grand moors and industrial glory of rural Lancashire. All are impressive, and all give wide views—but over very different terrain.
Yorkhire's Sea Cliffs
Over the millennia the North Sea has sliced off the eastern edge of the North York Moors as with a knife, exposing its hard rocky core for all to see—33 miles of continuous pinkish-tan cliffs never less than a hundred feet high and sometimes over six hundred. Villages shoe-horn into niches in the cliffs.
Britain's Two Greatest Inventions
These two modest inventions produced factories, powerful engines, electrical power grids, jet airplanes, economic theory, and computers.
England's Un-Natural Landscape
When we Americans discuss the environment, we tend to talk about natural/clean/good ecosystems v. man-made/polluted/bad ones. When we talk about "restoring" the environment, we are talking about returning a human-influenced landscape to its natural state. So it can be quite a shock to discover that England (along with Wales and nearly all of Scotland) has
no natural landscape at all, hasn't had one for many centuries, and maybe never had one.