Highways and Byways of Beautiful Britain

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 153, 24 March 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

Highways and Byways of Beautiful Britain

THE charm of the English countryside is never to be forgotten. Unlike the wild and lonely backblocks of New Zealand, it relies, not upon natural grandeur, but upon the pleasant and picturesque beauty of man’s cultivation. It is tame scenery. Even the Cornish coast, with its rocks and headlands, is not so grim and forlorn and unforgettable as the West Coast of our own South Island—but it relies upon the quaint and tiny fishing havens tucked away in nooks of the deep bays, and upon its unspoiled natural sea people, to give it enduring charm.

TO the New Zealander Devon and Cornwall, with their moors and rivers and rocky coves, lovely little villages, and delightful country people, are one of the most fascinating parts of England. The Midlands, though not without beauty, are “sodden and unkind,” and if they have villages of thatched cottages, and lanes liped with high elms where the rooks nest, and woods where fox and pheasant play the ancient game, why, so have the western counties. The rolling downs of the South of England, with their wide undulating hills so different from our steep mountainsides, are a type of country few New Zealanders have ever dreamed of. The hazy atmosphere of England cloaks them with romance. There is no clear horizon seen in the Old Country, but the sweep of the hills merges into the low - sky, and the clumps of trees only a few miles away stand (strangely like ghosts against the sky.

The hills of Scotland and Wales, the green valleys of Ireland, and their respective lake districts, are again very different from New Zealand’s woods and hills. They fail utterly to call to mind that sense of vast loneliness and of the littleness of man which is known

to all who wander in the Dominion’s high country. Yet their friendliness and prettiness make them more memorable. Like the whole of the British Isles, they are remarkable for their picture-like perfection of beauty. The towns of England are her wealth. The little market towns, Banbury and Bedford, Exeter and Plymouth, her cathedral cities, Salisbury and Canterbury, her university towns, Oxford and Cambridge, her great cities, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, possess a widely varied appeal. Plymouth with her ancient Barbican, where the Pilgrim Fathers embarked upon their epoch-making voyage of privation and hardship and the founding of a new nation, looks out upon a beautiful seaway; and from the fishing ketches drifting down the Sound you can hear the curious contrast of bugles blowing on the lean, grey men-of-war, and the cuckoo calling from a hillside golden with gorse.

London, greatest, oldest and most splendid city of all, has, besides the fascination of any great capital, a charm all of its own. The wide, tidal river with its smoky traffic, the fog-grimed ■ famous buildings, the green parks, distinguish London among all cities.