Hampshire

Hampshire is a gentle county which doesn't shout its charms, though her rounded downs and crystal-clear chalk streams are world renowned. In their time, the hills have guarded the ancient capital of Anglo-Saxon England - Winchester - and sheltered the arsenal of England in the two-thousand-year-old harbour of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. It was also in Hampshire that such innate aspects of Englishness as fly-fishing and cricket were first conceived and played, and from which D-day was launched to liberate Europe in 1944. Through the native genius of Jane Austen, the novel reached its first flowering in the county, and nature writing began with Gilbert White, who opened up a new universe with his minute observation of the natural world around him in his Hampshire parish of Selborne. This tradition was built on by W H Hudson in the New Forest and further amplified by the poet Edward Thomas, walking amongst the beech hangers before his early death in the trenches in 1917. In addition to these quiet triumphs, Hampshire: through writers' eyes offers the affectionate mocking attention of P G Wodehouse, Beryl Bainbridge, Olivia Manning and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, each adding to the rich treasury of stories which throw light on the county.