This is a launch page for articles that bring you to places where you can wallow in the places that made Britain what it is today, from the battles people fought to the way they farmed, from pre-history to just yesterday.
England's Un-Natural Landscape
Americans are used to thinking of a natural landscape as wilderness, or at least old growth. Taking this as our definition, however, England has no natural landscapes, none at all, and hasn't for many centuries.
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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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The Sea Cliffs of Yorkshire
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 see33 miles of continuous pinkish-tan cliffs never less than a hundred feet high and sometimes over 600 feet. Tiny villages shoe-horn into niches in the cliffs, their painted stone cottages terracing up stepped alleys.
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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Lancashire's Panopticons
The Panopticons are a public art project meant to highlight both the grand moors and the industrial glory of rural Lancashire. All are impressive, and all give wide views — but over very different terrain.
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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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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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 here it is.
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