Explore "On History in Travel" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I have sometimes wondered whether it might not be possible to have guide-books written for the great routes of modern travel -- I mean of modern pleasure-travel -- which should make the whole road a piece of history; for history enlarges everything one sees, and gives a fulness to flat experience, so that one lives more than one's own life in contemplating it, and so that new landscapes are not only new for a moment, but subject to centuries of varieties in one's mind.
It is true that those who write good guide-books do put plenty of history into them, but it is sporadic history, as it were; it is not continuous or organic, and therefore it does not live. You are told of a particular town that such was its Roman name; that centuries later such a mediaeval contest was decided in its neighbourhood. If it is connected in some way with the military history of this country you will be given some detailed account of an action fought there, and that is particularly the case in Spain, which one leaves with the vague impression that it was created to serve as a terrain for the Peninsular War.