Wales is the home of three National Parks and five areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty; its landscape is enchanting, attracting over 13 million visitors each year.
Much has been written about Colchester and its rich and varied heritage, but rather less attention has been given to the surrounding rural communities.
Tunstall, it would seem, has always been a town of modernity and progress, from its developing industry of the late eighteenth century to the thriving market and impressive amenities that emerged in the nineteenth century.
In 1698 Celia Fiennes an intrepid traveler and relative of the Boscawen family rode into Truro on horseback and immediately loved it although she described it in her diary as 'a ruinated and disregarded place, formerly a great tradeing town'.
Rising in the chalk hills to the east of Shaftesbury and fringing the Salisbury Plain, the River Nadder begins its route through the most beautiful pastoral country in south Wiltshire, its meandering course adding much to the diversity of the landscape.
The old village of Thorpe Hesley, once the home of nail-makers, coal miners, farmers and smallholders, has been engulfed by modern residential development.
The picturesque village of Thornton Dale was voted the prettiest village in Yorkshire at the beginning of the tourist era in the 1920s and '30s and was subsequently renamed the more resonant Thornton-le-Dale.
This selection of over 200 photographs offers a further perspective on the life and times of Thirsk and its surrounding districts, showing how they have changed over the last century and beyond.
Since the development of photography in the middle of the last century, the picture of our past provided by the written chronicle, the museum artefact or by failing memory has been augmented by the most vivid and immediate relic of former times, the photograph.
The development of the Tetbury that we are so familiar with today was closely associated with the wool trade, which enabled many of the buildings to be rebuilt in the most modern styles, to reflect the fortunes of the tradesmen.
The designated 'new town' of Telford in Shropshire received its name in 1968; in fact, it is not a new town but rather a conurbation of townships and villages whose story goes back 3,000 years.
If folk were able to travel back in time to visit towns and villages in and around the modern Telford conurbation, these are the scenes they'd see a hundred years ago.
The Local Government Reorganisation Plan of 1971 brought together the nine townships of Ashton under Lyne, Audenshaw, Denton, Droylsden, Dukinfield, Hyde, Longdendale, Mossley and Stalybridge and, from 1 April 1974, the towns came together under the nomenclature of Tameside.
With rolling green hills and extensive woodlands, it's easy to see why the Chiltern Hills are one of the most beautiful and well visited of all England's natural wonders.
For more than 4,000 years, Droitwich based its existence on the unique, natural subterranean resource of Droitwich brine, one of the purest and most concentrated, naturally occurring solutions of salt in the world.
