Hampshire

<p><span style=color: rgba(71 88 88 1)>Hampshire is a gentle county which doesn't shout its charms though her rounded downs and crystal-clear chalk streams are world renowned. In their time the hills have guarded the ancient capital of Anglo-Saxon England - Winchester - and sheltered the arsenal of England in the two-thousand-year-old harbour of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. It was also in Hampshire that such innate aspects of Englishness as fly-fishing and cricket were first conceived and played and from which D-day was launched to liberate Europe in 1944. </span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(71 88 88 1)>Through the native genius of Jane Austen the novel reached its first flowering in the county and nature writing began with Gilbert White who opened up a new universe with his minute observation of the natural world around him in his Hampshire parish of Selborne. This tradition was built on by W H Hudson in the New Forest and further amplified by the poet Edward Thomas walking amongst the beech hangers before his early death in the trenches in 1917. </span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(71 88 88 1)>In addition to these quiet triumphs </span><em style=color: rgba(71 88 88 1)>Hampshire: through writers' eyes </em><span style=color: rgba(71 88 88 1)>offers the affectionate mocking attention of P G Wodehouse Beryl Bainbridge Olivia Manning and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle each adding to the rich treasury of stories which </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(71 88 88 1)>throw light on the county. </span></p>