Discovering the countryside

England is densely populated, but just outside the towns it becomes a country of green fields, low hills, rivers, small woods and leafy lanes.

At weekends, many British people like to discover the countryside and walk small parts of the long-distance footpaths which cross Britain.

The most well-known long-distance footpath is 874 miles (1,408 km) long and runs from Land's End, the south-west tip of England, to John o'Groats in the far north of Scotland. There is also the 248-mile (400-kilometre) Pennine Way, which starts in Derbyshire, in the centre of England and runs north to Scotland. The Pembrokeshire Coastal Path follows the coast in south-east Wales, and the Ridgeway, a pre-Roman path, runs from central England to the River Thames.

Michael Vaughan-Rees, Geraldine Sweeney, Picot Cassidy: In Britain; Cornelsen Verlag, 2000, page 72