Explore "On the Traveller" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Those who travel about England for their pleasure, or, for that matter, about any part of Western Europe, rightly associate with such travel the pleasure of history: for history adds to a man, giving him, as it were, a great memory of things like a human memory, but stretched over a far longer space than that of one human life. It makes him, I do not say wise and great, but certainly in communion with wisdom and greatness.
It adds also to the soil he treads, for to this it adds meaning. How good it is when you come out of Tewkesbury by the Cheltenham road, to look upon those fields to the left and know that they are not only pleasant meadows, but also the place in which the fate of English mediaeval monarchy was decided; or, as you stand by that ferry which is not known enough to Englishmen (for it is one of the most beautiful things in England) and look back and see Tewkesbury tower framed between tall trees over the level of the Severn, to see the Abbey buildings in your eye of the mind -- a great mass of similar stone with solid Norman walls, standing to the right of the building.