Since fields are small and boundaries are many, paths are always encountering obstacles: a hedge of tough twisted shrubs, a barbed wire fence, a drystone wall, for example. For this reason the walker has to deal with stiles. Stiles are a means of crossing these barriers if there are no gates to open. A stile can be a simple wooden ladder, or a wooden frame with a step. In stony country, ingenious footholds are built sideways into the walls, or small gaps are made in the wall, too narrow for a sheep (or a fat person) to pass through.
Apart from the footpaths (and bridleways along which people can ride horses and pedal cycles), we have a few large National Parks for open-air recreation. The land is often privately owned and privately farmed, but the public have free access to the most beautiful areas. Thousands of volunteers work with the park wardens to ensure that these wild natural areas are free of rubbish, glass, litter and that the natural plant-life is protected. One big difference between Britain and Russia is that when we go out into the open countryside and enjoy the beauties of nature, we do not have to wade around in a mess of broken glass, dirty plastic, tin cans and other kinds of filth. Most walkers and campers clear up their sites; those who behave badly can be prosecuted; but the difficult work is done by paid people and by these volunteers.
The British have one other valuable source of exercise and pleasure - the shores of our island which were described at the beginning of this chapter. Most of our beaches are public, unlike those in America or much of Europe. Our coastline is thousands of miles long, with wonderful opportunities not only for sunbathing and playing and swimming, but also for solitary walking. Where the coast is rocky we have established cliff-top walks with views across miles of sea to the furthest horizons. Sixty million people on a small island need space in which to enjoy their 'precious stone set in a silver sea'.
Chapter 2. Cities and Towns
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has a population of around 61 million in 2009. Of these people, more than 50 million in England, an area approximately the same size as Permsky Krai. We may love and enjoy our countryside but most of us live in cities and towns; we are, by a large majority, an urban population. When we think of towns and cities in England we have very different images in mind from the images of typical Russian towns. The origins and structure of English towns and cities relate to the land and are manifest in their size, architecture, and relationship to one another.
Some of our towns have recorded origins nearly two thousand years ago when Britain was part of the Roman Empire and when strategic roads were built across England for military purposes. They needed military stations which quickly developed as towns for trade and construction. After the Romans came invasions of Saxon, Danes and eventually the Norman French under William the Conqueror. William ordered his officials to compile an account of the new country over which he ruled. As a consequence of this order, we can see that nearly a thousand years ago most of our present-day towns and villages were recorded in the Domesday Book (1087). We know that besides the Roman roads, many of which were partially disused or half-buried, the tracks and roads which connected these towns and villages to one another were already well-used by walkers, horses and carts. From mediaeval times the largest towns were ports; inland were 'market towns' which provided useful trading for the surrounding villages. London was capital, port and commercial centre for the whole of the country. This traditional and organic pattern of population settlement was later overlaid with the rapid development of the great industrial cities of the north and the midlands in the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
If you have the chance to look out of a plane over England you can see this pattern of development. Most towns and villages look like irregular stars; even the smallest village is connected to two or three others. A town of about 100,000 people can have seven or eight major routes leading out of it in an approximate star shape; cities of 500,000 or more have dozens of connections to the nearby towns and villages. By contrast, the view from a plane over Russia where the population is more thinly spread shows roads stretching vast distances in lonely grandeur through empty countryside, villages where houses are built in a single line on either side of the road, settlements constructed on a grid pattern, and the old centres of towns surrounded by high-rise flats that come to abrupt end right up against the forest. This is a very alien pattern for us. We have no such forests or other 'virgin land' on which to build. Even the nineteenth century industrial cities grew up on the basis of an existing network of roads and villages.
One result of this historical development of our urban areas is that although our country is much more densely populated than yours, only London has more than a million people (around 7 million). By contrast, Russia has a population less than three times the population of England, but has 36 cities with around one million inhabitants or more. In Britain, the next biggest city after London is Birmingham with just one million, Leeds with about 700,000, and Sheffield, Bradford, Liverpool and Manchester all with between 400,000 and 550,000. All these cities are separate cities, although they are very close to other urban areas, and all of them, apart from London, expanded as major industrial cities in the nineteenth century. The largest city outside London which was already highly developed in mediaeval times as a port and commercial centre is Bristol, with less than 400,000 inhabitants.
(Scotland's largest city is Glasgow with a population of 580,000, followed by Edinburgh (the capital) with 450,000. Cardiff, the capital of Wales, has a population of about 300,000, and Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, a population of 275,000.)
You may be puzzled by the use of two overlapping terms: 'town' and 'city'. A city is either a very large town (perhaps 300,000 or more inhabitants) or a town which has been granted a special charter and which has a cathedral in it. (A cathedral in Britain is not equivalent to a 'sobor' in Russia; there are only about forty English cathedrals in the whole country.) The two definitions of 'city' overlap, and today most people will think of the first meaning: a city is a large town. It has a grand centre with major civic buildings, several industries, substantial suburban areas and a region over which it has some authority.
Apart from the big cities, our land is tilled with hundreds of towns with populations between 20,000 and 150,000. There seem to be very few such towns in Russia, presumably because -given your distances - they are not very viable as commercial and industrial centres. In Britain they are usually historic market towns, or towns which developed with specific industries based on local resources (such as wool for glove-making, or suitable sand and clay for making bricks). Most of them have a centre where some of the streets have buildings dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The huge increase in the urban population in the nineteenth century meant that the Victorians built brick suburbs around these old centres and along the roads out of town. In the twentieth century, further housing developments 'filled in' the areas between one radial road and the next, and stretched out further along these roads. Hence the slowly-growing star shape.