Destination: BRITAIN
Things To Know Britain Explained A Diverse Unity Village Greens and Seaside From Oxford to the Lakes Wild Wales North to the Highlands Seeing the Country The Taste of Britain Protected by Sea	A Diverse Unity England, Scotland and Wales - collectively known as Britain - each retain individual cultural characteristics. To complicate matters further for the visitor, there are distinct regions within regions, all reflecting the resilient and determined individuality that is typically British. If you spend any time traveling through Britain, you will find that the landscape and the customs of the people change dramatically, sometimes within only a few miles. People have been arriving at all points around Britain's corrugated coastline for centuries, but London is the focus of the country as a whole. Here history, politics and culture meet in one of the most invigorating cities in the world. Beyond London lies provincial and rural England. You'll find a landscape of meadows, hedgerows and woods, its earth relentlessly farmed for centuries. The countryside has retained, in between the maze of roads and highways, a semblance of Old England, and in treasured corners the beauty of the past is preserved. At Canterbury, in Kent, is the great cathedral that drew tens of thousands of medieval pilgrims to the relics of the revered Thomas à Becket, the great English churchman. These pilgrims inspired the country's first great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, to write his Canterbury Tales, as vivid a picture of the medieval world as you will find. Yet before Chaucer and before Canterbury, the earliest Britons had raised their own pagan equivalents to the Christian cathedrals. At Stonehenge, and perhaps more hauntingly at Avebury in Wiltshire, at the heart of southern England, are the standing stones and burial chambers of Britons who commanded England centuries before Romans, Danes, Anglo Saxons and Normans ever did.	COUNTRY Introduction Things To Know Survival Guide TimeLine Essential Info REGION CITIES London Edinburgh Oxford York MAPS World Europe TRAVEL BOOK