haggis, neeps and tatties ...going the messages ...away and bile your heid ...halp ma boab ...scunnert ...that's the rain on ...you'll have had your tea
To be honest, I've been madly in love with the vividness of the UK ever since I started writing my second. I have to control the urge to type out a random search term in Google Images for research. I've put the entire UK in my 'to visit' bucket list. Oh! Loch Ness! Y'know? I spent an entire day reading on Loch Ness even though it isn't even remotely related to what I'm writing.
As a village boy who travels from the city to work out in the country near a village I appreciate the countryside and regularly go for lunchtime hikes. There are many details that I take for granted, such as the pheasants which line the walls of the nearby estate who dive kamikaze-like onto the road whenever a car approaches. The changing colours of the beech hedge surrounding the small Norman church as the seasons change. Although many of the hedges that once surrounded the smaller fields are now gone, victims of the economies of scale, some remain. The annual ravaging of these hedges by tractor mounted hedge strimmers is a wildlife catastrophe which is best glossed over. One sight that signals the falling temperatures is the sight of cars sticking out of the ditches; reckless fools who misunderstand the meaning of the signs; sharp bend ahead. One sight that comes back to me is from a time when I regularly had to drive across Northamptonshire in early some mornings. This part of england has an undulating topography and on some still mornings the valleys where the villages lay would fill up with fog. Driving along a road that was higher up, looking down all I could see was a sea of fog with occasional church spires protruding and occasional farms and barns on the top of the undulations appearing to be separated from all traces of humanity. Northamptonshire is definitely not usually an inspirational county. The Peak District and Lake District are definitely not bland. A dawn trip up Snowdon, having left the car park predawn, and stopping on Crib Goch for a breakfast to watch the dawn is not boring. Well not to me at least. The North Cornwall coastline definitely has its magical moments, with it's battered granite cliffs and secluded bays and inlets.
i would go into the rolling country side with its dry stone walls heather moorland some forests but large anmounts of relatively small cultivated fields. motorways and roads are often close by. the other thing is it is totally different where ever you are, the desolate wilderness of northern scotland and the Hebrides to the southern home counties which resemble hobbiton and the craggy cairngorm mountains in the scottish highlands(as seen in skyfall) and snowdonias mountains and the rolling hills of north wales. there are also the country estates of derbyshire, the welsh castles, and if you want to see northumbria which is extreamly beautiful watch Tales from Northumberland with Robson Green which is on itvplayer or on one of those torrent sites. honestly i think you need a holiday.
... and if you are in East Anglia the vast fields and big skies with occasional lines of Lombardy Poplars are a feature. Clichés are easy. Depends on how convincing you wish to be. Details is everything if you want to be believed. If you were writing about the Norfolk area and you mentioned details such as the sea marshes, the small collection of sheds that were home to a highly rated sea-food restaurant, the boat trips to see the seals then I *might* believe you were describing somewhere that I knew.
I suppose it depends where in Britain you are setting it - after all, there is a big difference between wide open-spaced fields of the west country dotted with trees and hedges and cottages (an an occasional stone circle), to the flat fields of the more built up home counties (once, Jane Austen's idyll, now not so much - still the occasional hillside figure), to the valleys of Wales, to the rocky hills of the Yorkshire Dales or the greyness of the Yorkshire Moors (think Wuthering Heights). Then there is the the mountains and waters of the Lake District, or the green hills and caves of the Peak District. But the thing that unites them all is the constant overcast grey sky (sunny days, however pathetic, will see the whole nation go and lay on the grass or go to the beach to catch the slightest bit of a tan), the queuing for everything (it's a disaster if someone jumps a queue, so everyone queues: for the shop, for the bus, for the toilets...everything!), the pubs, and the national obsession with the weather (if there's nothing to talk about at a social event, talk about the weather, if it's too hot - whinge, if it's too cold - whinge). That's just my experience!
This defininitely depends on where in Britain it is. Americans have this weird view of all of Britain looking the same and that really couldn't be further from the truth. I'm doing a tour of the UK in a few weeks, tell me what county or region you're looking at and I'll fit you up with a ton of photos.
Thomas Hardy located all of his major novels in the fictional county of Wessex, and he wrote beautiful descriptions of the countryside, the people, and their ways of life. Read Far from the Madding Crowd. Wessex was in the south of England. For a northern view, try Shirley, by Charlotte Bronte. Or Wuthering Heights by her sister Emily. Another good source is George Eliot. Her Adam Bede has some beautiful and detailed descriptions of the countryside and the people.
Wessex is half-fictional. It's a real place, encompassing most of the south of England, but the name is archaic, and never referred to a county.
Well, different countries/cultures view the exact same thing differently. To a Brit who has lived there every day of their life, it could be just another old cottage or croft that is about to give way and collapse in upon itself. To an American tourist who has never seen a 200 year old house, it is a historic antique, rare and precious, that captures a part of living history and must be photographed for posterity....or at least to show off to your neighbors when he gets back home to Atlanta, Georgia. Keep in mind that Americans only started counting their history from 1776, while the history of the British Isles dates back to the ancient Celts and has Roman ruins scattered all about. This difference in perceived historical timelines makes British "old junk" seem like "ancient historical relics" to American eyes. Likewise, if you want to describe traditional British countryside to American viewers, some terms to include could be "Glen", "Dale", "Shire", "Hedgerow", etc. These terms are rarely used by Americans to describe America, but accurately describe many rural landscapes in Britain.
