One of the things that I can never get over about your country is the persistence of "wild" areas like these. It reminds me of when I was in medical school and we were discussing how bad people are at properly assessing / grasping statistical probability, as in, you can tell a person what the chance is of something "bad" happening, but it's not usually meaningful to him, because our brains are poor at picturing just what a 1 in 70,000 chance (for instance) "looks like".
In a similar way, I hear that the population of the UK is 80 mill or whatever, and I think gee, it must be over-crowded, but it clearly isn't, not totally so.
Northumberland is the most sparsely populated county in England - and has been for centuries. eg. the Parish of Simonburn was the largest (in terms of area) of any in the Church of England.
http://simonburn.info/parish-history
And the doctors practice a friend used to work in, was the biggest in area in England.
By contrast, most of England seems crowded to me - even the hill areas like the Lake District or Yorkshire Dales. Perhaps only in the Cheviot Hills can you walk for an hour or more without meeting anyone.
3 comments:
Thanks for this one; I love the stone circles so much, and treading ground that's been trodden for 4000 years makes me giddy.
One of the things that I can never get over about your country is the persistence of "wild" areas like these. It reminds me of when I was in medical school and we were discussing how bad people are at properly assessing / grasping statistical probability, as in, you can tell a person what the chance is of something "bad" happening, but it's not usually meaningful to him, because our brains are poor at picturing just what a 1 in 70,000 chance (for instance) "looks like".
In a similar way, I hear that the population of the UK is 80 mill or whatever, and I think gee, it must be over-crowded, but it clearly isn't, not totally so.
Northumberland is the most sparsely populated county in England - and has been for centuries. eg. the Parish of Simonburn was the largest (in terms of area) of any in the Church of England.
http://simonburn.info/parish-history
And the doctors practice a friend used to work in, was the biggest in area in England.
By contrast, most of England seems crowded to me - even the hill areas like the Lake District or Yorkshire Dales. Perhaps only in the Cheviot Hills can you walk for an hour or more without meeting anyone.
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