When I visited Scotland in 2008, I described the land to others as a mix of Texas and England. They have pastures of rolling hills with stone fences and stone/brick homes in the middle of it all. As I drove through the Lake District today, crossing from Lancashire back to the east coast near Newcastle, it struck me why I didn’t use another state for the comparison. Why Texas? Why not anywhere else with hills?
There are very few trees.
England has been inhabited for centuries. The hills have been pastures and fields for longer than the USA has been an independent country. That’s why when you look at them and find they are breathtakingly beautiful, you wonder what makes them different than the other hills and mountains. They are bald.
But I love it. I think trees are beautiful in their own respect, but they can also be suffocating. You can barely see the land around you because of all the trees blocking the way. I moved from the concrete jungle of Chicago to Georgia and realized after a while how claustrophobic all the trees made me feel.
I know that not all of the hills are treeless. But the ones I saw made me really love the diversity in color and shadows that played across the treeless land. There’s beauty in every landscape. And treeless hills are part of England and Scotland’s charm.
