Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (5 page)

B
elfast was so dominant in the Irish linen industry that at the beginning of the 20th century it was briefly the largest city in Ireland. It has a proud engineering heritage and is still home to Harland and Wolff, once the biggest shipyard in the world, which in 1912 launched the ill-fated
Titanic
. It was also the builder of other famous British ships such as the cruiser HMS
Belfast
, now moored on the Thames opposite the Tower of London, and P&O’s
Canberra
liner. It was the home of Dr William Drennan (1754–1820) who in 1795 first used the term ‘the Emerald Isle’ to describe Ireland. In 1855 it was the home of Anthony Trollope when he completed his first Barsetshire novel
The Warden
while he was working for the Post Office. Belfast is the administrative and financial capital of the province of Northern Ireland and is the centre of highest population with about 280,000 citizens.

L
incoln Cathedral has the highest cathedral tower in Europe at 271 feet. Until 1549 it was the tallest building in the world, higher than the Great Pyramid but in 1549 its spire, 525 feet tall, collapsed. In the form of the 3rd century Roman Newport Arch Lincoln also has the oldest arch in Britain still used by traffic. It also has the Jew’s House dating from the mid-12th century which is reputed to be the oldest surviving domestic building in Britain, now a restaurant.

P
orthmadog, Gwynedd, is the terminus of the world’s oldest independent railway company. The Ffestiniog Railway was created by Act of Parliament in 1832 to convey slates from the quarries and mines at Blaenau Ffestiniog to the port of Porthmadog. It remained independent when the rest of the railway network was nationalized in 1948 and survives as a visitor attraction. During World War II the slate mines, which maintain a constant temperature and humidity, were used to store art treasures from the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery in London. Nearby Tremadog contains Lawrence House, the birthplace of T E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), and Criccieth, the home of David Lloyd George, prime minister and a famous son of Wales.

L
langollen, Denbighshire, is home to two remarkable memorials to British engineering excellence. The Llangollen Railway opened in 1865, was closed in 1962 and reopened in 1986 as a result of the determined efforts of volunteers. It is now one of the most popular steam railways in Britain, carrying passengers along the valley of the River Dee. Nearby is the extraordinary Pontcysyllte aqueduct, which carries the Llangollen Canal across the Dee valley. Completed in 1805, it is the longest and highest aqueduct in Britain, a Grade I listed structure and a World Heritage site. Built by Thomas Telford and William Jessop it consists of a cast iron trough over 1,000 feet in length, 126 feet above the river valley below. Nervous passengers on narrow-boats are advised to remain below deck when crossing the aqueduct since there is a towpath on only one side and a sheer drop on the other.

M
almesbury in Wiltshire is England’s oldest borough, its charter having been granted by Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great in 880. It also had the very first church organ in England, installed in Malmesbury Abbey in 700, driven by bellows. Moreover the Old Bell hotel, close to the abbey, was built around the remains of a Saxon castle in 1220 as a guest house for the abbey and, having been in use ever since as a lodging house or hotel, can claim to be Britain’s oldest hotel.

R
osslyn Chapel, in the small Scottish village of Roslin, south of Edinburgh, was built in the middle of the 15th century and contains some of the finest medieval carving in the world. It has also gained unsought fame, and many visitors, through its association with the Knights Templar, Freemasonry and the Holy Grail as a result of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel and film
The Da Vinci Code
.

S
carborough in Yorkshire became the first British seaside resort as a result of the discovery of spa waters there in the early 17th century. It was the first resort to use bathing machines, in 1735. But in 1914 Scarborough entered the record books for less desirable reasons when it became the first British town to be shelled by the German fleet during December 1914 in World War I. With its seaside neighbours Hartlepool and Whitby also struck by German battlecruisers, 137 people were killed and nearly 600 wounded.

P
erth was the site of one of the most extraordinary episodes in Scottish history, the Battle of the Clans. In September 1396 a staged battle was fought, in the presence of spectators including King Robert III of Scotland, between the Chattan Confederation (the Mackintoshes, Macphersons and other clans) and their traditional enemies whose identity is far from clear but may have been their traditional rivals the Clan Cameron. It is not even clear what the dispute was about. Thirty warriors from each side fought on Perth’s North Inch, now a peaceful and charming park within the city. The Chattans were declared the victors when they killed all but one of their opponents for the loss of nineteen of their own warriors. Nearby is Scone Abbey, home of the Stone of Scone on which Scottish kings were traditionally crowned. Long a ruin the abbey was further damaged in September 2010 when a white van collided with a 500-year-old archway which was the best-preserved relic of the medieval building.

S
kegness, situated on the east coast of England in Lincolnshire, saw the opening of the first Butlin’s holiday camp at Easter in 1936. The first visitor was Freda Monk who found the new facility deserted when she arrived until she found the camp manager who explained that it wasn’t opening until the following day. For Britons who had been used to seaside holidays in boarding houses where they were thrown out after breakfast, regardless of the weather, the Butlin’s holiday camp – with four meals a day, chalet accommodation, knobbly-knee competitions and jolly Redcoats – was a revelation. The weekly charge was £3 a person – roughly an average week’s wages. By 1938 Britain had 150 holiday camps, helped by the passage that year of the Holidays with Pay Act. In March 2005, Skegness was declared the best retirement place in Great Britain following a survey by
Yours Magazine
. Sixty likely towns were surveyed against such criteria as house prices, hospital waiting lists, crime rates, council tax rates, activities and attractions, weather patterns and ease of transport.
Lonely Planet’s
Great Britain guide wrote that it had ‘everything you could want’ in a seaside resort. Nevertheless in July 2008 Boris Johnson, newly elected as Mayor of London, upset some people in an article in the
Daily Telegraph
in which he declared, ‘Stuff Skegness, my trunks and I are off to the sun.’

H
arlech in Wales’s Cardigan Bay is home to one of the fourteen castles built by King Edward I in his conquest of Wales. Its design, consisting of two rings of concentric walls, makes it almost impregnable and it was situated so that it could be supplied from the sea and thereby withstand sieges. Nevertheless in 1404 Owain Glyndwr managed to take the castle after a long siege and for the following four years it was his headquarters and the de facto capital of Wales. From 1461–1468 it held out against the longest known siege in British history, remaining the last Lancastrian stronghold in Wales during the Wars of the Roses, a feat which inspired the song
Men of Harlech
. Nearby are the Roman Steps, a staircase cut into the mountain. Traditionally associated with the Romans, who quarried slate in the area, their precise origin is a mystery.

I
n 1850, alarmed by the overflowing burial grounds of London churches, Parliament purchased 2,000 acres of land at Brookwood, near Woking in Surrey. The London and South-Western Railway constructed adjacent to Waterloo a special station for mourners and two stations at Woking Necropolis station (now called Brookwood), one for use by Anglicans and one for Nonconformists. The new cemetery was consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester in 1854 and since that time almost a quarter of a million people have been buried there. It is the largest cemetery in Europe and contains separate sections for groups including Latvians, Chelsea Pensioners and Muslims. Dodi Fayed was initially buried there but was later moved to a grave in the grounds of the Fayed family home at Oxted in Surrey. Woking is also the home of the first purpose-built mosque ever built in Britain, the Shah Jahan Mosque, which opened in 1889.