Scenic Destinations

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 see—33 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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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Cornwall's Penwith Peninsula:
At the End of England

Cornwall’s 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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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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