h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There must be someone out there who knows about Buckinghamshire - why not lend h2g2 a hand and help us write an entry on it!

Paully

Chenies: Chenies Manor, the former home to the Earls of Bedford. Was favoured by both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, for its gardens and stunning tudor brickwork.

Beaconsfield: Home of Beaconscot, a model village trapped in 1930s. Famous for it elaborate model railway that snakes round the 1 and a half acre site.

Hurrah! Our first comment on Buckinghamshire! Well done, Ged! I'm sure now you've made a start, the floodgates will open and dozens of people will be queueing up to put forward their own favourite facts and figures about Buckinghamshire!

Paully

Buckinghamshire is home to the UK's first motorway service station at Newport Pagnell on the M1.

Also, unfortunately, to Milton Keynes...

Which is, I seem to recall, one of the centres of witchcraft in the UK owing to the way in which the entire town was constructed with the roads running directly along ley lines... dunno if that's true, it's just an obscure fact about MK that I remembered in addition to the concrete cows!

Paully

The roads are on a terribly dull grid - I thought ley lines were a little less uniform, but my knowledge of such things is fairly sketchy. One of the main roads is an old Roman road, but the rest are named either H (East-West horizontal ones) or V (North-South vertical ones). Yawn...

In addition to the cows, there is a concrete stegasaurus (sp?), just for variety.

I grew up in Newport Pagnell (just outside MK, but literally within spitting distance if the wind's in the right direction), which has much more character than MK ever will! NP is also the home of the Aston Martin factory.

Maybe when mentioning Milton Keynes' Concrete Cows you should link to A680104

I'm delighted to announce that we already have two County entries in Peer Review, waiting to receive any bouquets or brickbats that people might lob in their general direction! If you're currently either working on or contributing to a County entry of your own right now, you might like to have a quick look to see how some other researchers have tackled this challenge. They are: County Fermanagh (A6092606) and Norfolk (A6108473).

Hope you enjoy reading them!

Paully

The county town of Buckinghamshire is Aylesbury, not, as one might expect, Buckingham. The market in Aylesbury dates back to somewhere around the 13th centuary when the inhabitants made their living from farming rather than industry - there was a weekly cattle market in the town right up until 1987. It became the administrative centre for the region dating back to the time when Henry VIII was king and was later important in the civil war. The MP at the time, John Hampden refused to pay Charles 1st's ship tax and his arrest is thought to have precipitated the war. In the battle of Holman's Bridge led the defence of the town against the royalists. A statue of John Hampden stands at the top of Market Square and points south, where he regularly acquires a traffic cone for a hat and has various latex products pulled over his extended finger.

The town remained a small market town for centuaries, and began to expand rapidly after 1899 with the coming of rail links to London, Birmingham and Manchester.

More later...

Anyone interested in taking this one on? We are now offering T-shirts in an effort to get the last few counties through PR and into the EG.