All Colour Picture Book of Britain [antikvár]

IntroductionAll countries are beautiful to their inhabitants. Each has something unique to offer to visitors and has a history which its people recall with pride and warmth. What, then, is so special about Britain?Nowhere in Britain is there the kind of breathtaking scenery such as you find in Kenya or Kashmir. It has no splendid ancient buildings like the Pyramids of Egypt or the Parthenon in Athens. There are no huge rivers like the Amazon in South America or the Missouri-Mississippi in the United States, nor mountains like the Himalayas, nor deserts like the Gobi. Civilization reached Britain less than 4,000 years ago, which is late in the human time scale, and its early development had no significant influence upon the progress of mankind. In world geographical terms it is a small place and it goes nowhere. To get to it you have to make a special journey across the sea. Like all other countries, its history has been shaped by its geography as much as by anything else, and in turn its history has moulded its landscape. Yet more people visit Britain than almost anywhere else in the world, while for centuries it has been somewhere to which peoples of other nations have come to setde.Britain, which is only a twelfth of the area of the state of Texas in the U.S.A., packs into its very small space an astonishing variety : cathedrals of every period in 900 years of building history, ancient monuments by the hundred, some reaching back to the 3rd millennium B.C., castles by the thousand, churches by the ten thousand, old homes, great and small, by the hundred thousand. They are scattered about in numerous counties and districts in the four countries England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland that make up Britain, and also in the Republic of Ireland, or Eire. And they are for the most part linked by the best and most diffuse road system anywhere. Each of the many counties and districts is different from the next and the differences are instantly noticeable, whether in the type of stone used for building, or the style of country or village cottage, or even by the accent with which the English language is pronounced by the locals. Added to that, Wales, Scodand and the Irish Republic have their own native tongues, branches of the Celtic group of languages, and people of Cornwall and the Isle of Man also speak dieir own Celtic tongues.These are perhaps the outward and visible signs that fascinate the visitor. There are less tangible aspects of Britain that make it remarkable. It has not been invaded from Europe or anywhere else for over 900 years. It is the home of the Mother of Parliaments. It was the first country in the world to be industrialised. It once ruled the greatest empire the world has ever seen, which covered a quarter of the land on the surface of the earth. Its territorial power has gone, but paradoxically its spiritual influence is greater than ever. Above all, its people and its insdtutions appear to be indestructible.Fiona and Plantagenet Somerset Fry