1936 On the Continent

it comes in your itinerary and do your English visit around it.
Design Your Tour
    It is a grave mistake that people from overseas make in thinking England so small they can do all of it in a day or two. It is small. But it’s so full of detail that you must allow ever so much longer than you expect to see a district thoroughly. Here’s a warning—if you try to dash from one place to another, you will just be poured along the arterial roads seeing nothing but medicine advertisements and building land for sale. You will bypass monotonously all the interesting old towns, spend hours on roads that we English people avoid like the plague and leave to the lorries, and go back disappointed.
    So, design your tour carefully, that you may go to the place of your heart’s desire through one district, and come back happily through another.
For West Country Folk
    Supposing, therefore, you are mining folk or your people were Cornish people, or your wife’s people were golden-haired creamy-skinned Devon folk—then assuredly you will sell your soul for a mess of good red earth, down Devon way.You will want the sweet, soft, West Country—the land of cream, clotted cream, and daffodils—yellow and dancing in the sunlight; a country that goes up and down in rounded hills and hollow combes. Across these combes, the heavy sweet scent of the golden gorse comes on a hot summer’s day, and you may hear the bell-buoy rocking far out in the deep blue Devon sea. You must go to Westward Ho! and Appledore and Bideford, and you can drive right across Dartmoor (where the little wild ponies come close to the roadway), and visit little fishing villages. You may get the Cornish pilchards. If you’re in luck, you may see the Brixham fishing fleet sail out; some of the finest sailors in the world have come from Brixham, and while you are down there, in the West, you must go on to Land’s End.
    You Western folk belong to find some cider—enough to make you happy and sure that Devon is the finest, warmest and sweetest country under the sun.
For Welsh People
    Supposing, now, you’ve Welsh blood in your veins—then, yes, yes, indeed—you must go to the Wild Welsh Hills. To save time you may even go straight along Watling Street so that you can be there five or six hours from London. But we will suggest that you approach your homeland with happy circumspection, and you shall go up along the silver Severn Valley and see the ramparts of the Welsh Hills above you and storm your way through the Castles of the Marches.
For Yorkshire Folk
    Then, if you are “A North Country maid, who to London had strayed,” or a Yorkshire tyke, you had better decide to go straight up to your own north country, for,
    “Oh, the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree,
    “They flourish best at home in the North countree!” And you shall go into small hidden places up the Dales where the white limestone crags stand up over the emerald green valleys, and a trout-beck, clear as silver, ripples along over the white and jewelled pebbles; and under the stone bridges the spotted trout lie, waving slowly in the swift, cold current. And because you are a Yorkshiremancoming home (and I am a Yorkshireman too), I will tell you where to get real Wensley Dale cheese, and clapper oat-cake from the very small bakehouse that sends its speciality to Simpson’s in the Strand, because it’s so good, and so English. And you shall have real Yorkshire Beef and crisp Yorkshire Pudding (and won’t it go down well, if you’re a hardy “outpost of Empire” man, who lives on goat chop and tough chicken?).
The Saxon
    But the Saxon home-comer, the descendant of Hereward the Wake—he will get the plumpest chickens out in East Anglia. Foreign visitors do not go much into that level eastern plain of ours—they just go and see Cambridge and perhaps extend their tour to Ely—but the real yellow-haired and blue-eyed Saxon should explore his Fenland and meet the hardy, curious Fen-men who have many strange ways.
    It is a cold and bracing land in the winter, with acres of skating, and in the summer the bright hot sunshine is usually tempered with a fresh sea breeze.
    If you are a naturalist the Fens are a Paradise. There are bird sanctuaries for the migrant birds from the North.
    It is a land for the motorist of long straight roads, with the water gurgling either side, and fields of corn and open sky, and the bells of Croyland sound with a wild sweetness through the dusk of a summer evening,