Only an island.
But from this island, so modest in size that no place is more than 75 miles from the sea.
From this small green castle island sprang parliamentary government.
The most far-flung empire ever known.
And the language that holds together the free world.
From nations on five continents, this island holds the mother country of their parliaments and their civil law.
And for millions of North Americans, it's an ancestral homeland.
London is its hub, the center of the English-speaking universe.
A capital of commerce, of theater and the arts, of entertainment.
Of elegant shopping and strolling.
And of sights both curious and colossal.
London is so great a city and England looms so large in reputation that a first-time visitor may lose sight of just how small this island is.
Keep in mind that the places we'll be visiting are rarely more than a half day's trip from London.
Canterbury, where an archbishop was murdered by the henchmen of a king.
Prehistoric Stonehenge, as old as the pyramids of the pharaoh.
Bath, a dazzling spa where kings and queens cavorted.
Plymouth, from where the Pilgrim Fathers set sail.
Hauntingly familiar through the novels Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, the Yorkshire Moors.
Glorious Blenheim Palace, ancestral home of Winston Churchill.
An ancient Celtic kingdom of poetry and song, Wales.
The port city of Liverpool, where the Beatles launched their fabulous careers.
The serene Lake District.
The renowned universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
The oldest lived-in royal castle on earth, Windsor.
And Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon.
This is Britain.
Royal Britain.
Who are these English?
Our hosts when we visit their island, moored as it is between the English Channel to the
East and the Dark Atlantic to the West.
Their long history reveals, sometimes brutally, that there is sterling a mixture of human
odds and ends as those breeds known as Americans, Canadians and Australians.
And their roots go deeply into prehistory.
Deep greys among the sacred stones of a prehistoric race that peopled this island tens of centuries
ago, whose cairns, dolmens and mounds contour the countryside.
These Welshmen are direct descendants of the Celts with whom British history began.
Their boats are coracles, the small boats of the Celts unchanged since Britain was a
patchwork of Celtic kingdoms.
In the century before Christ, Julius Caesar invaded with his conquering legions.
Romans laid the foundation of civilized Britain.
Stately temples and courts of law, baths and villas, roads and sewers and agricultural
know-how.
You can visit Roman ruins in many parts of the island.
When Rome fell and her legions marched sadly out of Britannia, warlike Teutonic tribes
from the continent, Jutes, Angles, Saxons crossed the channel and took over the island,
establishing several feisty kingdoms of their own.
In time, the whole hotly contested island, Saxon kingdoms and all, became known as the
land of just one of those Teutonic interlopers, the Angles, Angle Land or England.
And no sooner were things settling down than Vikings began invading.
They hacked out a chunky kingdom of their own with Jorvik, now called York, as their
capital.
Of these tribal ingredients, time was a yeast that gave rise to a national character.
Then, as the mixture was beginning to settle, another invasion.
In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, crossed the English channel and with his victory at
Hastings, conquered England.
Now, a dash of Norman French was added to the mixture.
In our day, William might have made that trip from France to Britain under the channel,
enjoying a stupendous engineering project undertaken jointly by the Republic of France
and the United Kingdom, a project that sparked endless debates among the English.
From this island melting pot came a distinctively British mold of character, a Roman respect
for law, a Teutonic devotion to duty, a Celtic passion for poetry, and a Vikings mastery
of the sea, which for several centuries had made Britannia ruler of the waves.
The British are famed for other traits too, some of which border on eccentricity, an old
school sense of fair play, if it's lacking, it just isn't cricket, an obsession with their
gardens, a dithery devotion to their dogs, and a deeply felt loyalty to the queen.
Though they're aware that despite the royal pageantry, at times, she's just another doting
grandmother.
Americans approach Britain from the east, crossing the English channel by boat train
or ferry from Calais in France, or Belgium's Haustende, or the Hook of Holland, disembarking
as William the Conqueror had in the lovely south of England.
Dover and a first view of its chalky white cliffs.
The city of Dover is a cross-channel port, bustling with visitors to and from the continent.
Garden of England is what the county of Kent is called, the pastoral England of the picture
books, with fragrant fields to stroll in, and placid rivers for boating, with castles
rising from shimmering moats.
It was here in Leeds Castle that, as a young woman, Queen Elizabeth I was held prisoner,
with a coastline textured with golden beaches and harbors for sailing craft, with friendly
towns and villages, their names sometimes reading like a menu.
In rural Kent, hops are the cash crop.
Vital to the tang and the taste of beer, British hops from Kent are prized by brewers and savored
in the local pubs.
Public houses, or pubs, are a way of life throughout Britain.
There are wholesome gathering places offering lager, ale, sherry, or spirits with traditional
pub fare.
The cathedral town of Canterbury has been drawing people since Chaucer's Pilgrims of
Canterbury Tales.
For almost a thousand years, this cathedral has been the seat of the Archbishop who heads
the English Church.
Thomas Becket, an Archbishop of the 12th century, was murdered here, and here he is entombed.
Becket had been friend and Chancellor to King Henry II, but when a clash occurred, Becket
chose the Church against the Crown.
The King had cried.
The King's henchmen confronted Becket with their swords.
Here he was murdered.
Later King Henry did penance for his part in the crime.
Stripped naked, he was flogged before the populace.
A later monarch, George IV, was anything but a penitent.
It was he who turned a fishing village on the south coast into an 18th century Disneyland.
Eastside Brighton is just an hour by train from London's Victoria Station.
It offers everything a vacationer could hope for, except peace and quiet.
As Prince Regent, George's bizarre triumph was the Royal Pavilion, and here he entertained
like a prince.
On at least one occasion, His Royal Highness gorged himself in the big kitchen among the
pots and pans of the Scullions.
For Augusta Briny, Britain, Portsmouth, where the fleet puts in, 70 miles south of London.
It was from Portsmouth on D-Day, June 6, 1944, that Allied troops set forth to invade Nazi-occupied
France, the biggest single thrust toward victory in the European War.
But Portsmouth has been logging naval histories for many a century.
Lord Nelson's flagship is in dry dock here, ship-shaped and year.
The Mary Rose had been lying at the sea's bottom for more than four centuries.
Flagship of a fleet of men of war, she sank in full view of King Henry VIII on a July
day in 1545.
In 1982, she was raised and put on display.
Her hull will have to be kept wet for another 20 years or so, and then gradually permeated
with silicone wax.
Most of the 50,000 items salvaged from the Mary Rose are in an excellent state of preservation,
and now make up an exhibition of their own.
In legend, the West Country was the realm of King Arthur.
In fact, it's a Camelot to British holidaymakers.
The ideal hour to visit Stonehenge is at dawn on the summer solstice, for then the sun rises
directly above the heelstone, illuminating the theory that Stonehenge had been an astronomical
observatory.
But no one knows for sure.
This megalithic structure dates back 30 to 40 centuries.
It is the most awesome prehistoric monument in the world.
Stonehenge still baffles, still mystifies.
Not too far away, you can pay a call at Longleat House, just one of many stately homes and mansions
with their doors open to visitors.
Most of these houses are still lived in by aristocrats who today must scrape to pay the
taxes on them.
At Sheldon Manor, which has been lived in for over 700 years, you can take tea in the
garden.
Before touring the house.
We're coming now into the priest's room, which is the oldest room in the house, one
of the very oldest in Wiltshire.
It goes back to 1282, Sir Geoffrey Gasland, who built the house.
Faring the Salisbury Plain with Stonehenge, the Cathedral of Salisbury.
Its soaring spire the highest in England.
It has soaring spires and can omnipresent.
Pantheons deep in the landscaped gardens of Starhead recall woodland nymphs of 18th century
fancies.
And every summer for four days, Starhead is overrun by flappers of the roaring twenties.
Eccentric, nostalgic, romantic, the Starhead Jazz Festival.
Plymouth in Devonshire has one of the finest natural harbors in the world.
Born here in 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for North America.
For the folk who've lived here for centuries, the sea is the salt of life, a source of their
food and their fun.
Of the famed Plymouth sea dogs, Sir Francis Drake stands tallest on history's horizon,
the first Englishman to navigate the globe.
People here never tire of dressing up and reliving that windy day in July of 1588.
Sir Francis was enjoying a game of bowls.
And sailing by Plymouth Ho was a great flotilla, 125 armed vessels manned by 24,000 men eager
to pillage Little England.
Historians call it the Spanish Armada.
The alarm was sounded.
Sports lover that he was, Sir Francis finished his game of bowls before attending to the
Spanish.
The game of bowls is done, the bowfellows and to pay the dragon's game of bowls.
The most celebrated spa in England, Bath.
The occupying Romans were quick to take advantage of the waters here, the only natural hot springs
in Britain.
In 53 AD, they built this health club with an Olympian pool with promenades for relaxing.
What was good enough for the Romans was good enough for British royalty.
After Queen Anne visited in 1701 to take the waters, Bath was transformed into a Georgian
townscape of graceful crescents and stately squares.
You can still enjoy a glass of the spring water that earned Bath its name and fame.
The rivers Avon and Severn are life-giving arteries to the heart of England, beating
peacefully throughout picture book villages, but with a loud murmur in the centers of industry.
Peaks District National Park, peak meaning hill in Old English, and Canock Chase for
a glimpse of the fallow deer that abound here.
Staffordshire is graced with silvery streams and rivers, verdant forest glades, and a venerably
old cathedral.
Alton Towers was the former home of the Earl of Shrewsbury.
Now it's the home of one of the world's loveliest leisure parks.
Here one can roam acres of fancifully landscaped gardens and enjoy a fun ride at this coney
island in a lush floral setting.
The Gladstone Pottery Museum in Longton, one of six pottery towns making up Stoke-on-Trent,
merits a visit.
To lovers of fine English china, a visit is more like a pilgrimage.
Here 200-year-old methods of porcelain and china making are still practiced.
Artists have kept up with today's technology, yet the sterling craftsmanship is the same,
which visitors to the potteries see for themselves.
Wedgewood Spold
Royal Dalton Hand-guilding is a fine brush application of
liquid 22-carat gold.
Beauty, quality, function, the china of Staffordshire is prized the world over.
It was in Shropshire that a giant step was taken that changed civilization.
Iron Bridge Here in 1779, the world's first iron bridge
was built.
It fast became a symbol of the Industrial Revolution.
Here for the first time, coal replaced charcoal, making possible iron production on a huge
scale.
But like all revolutions, the Industrial One was not without its casualties.
Room folk, men, women and children deserted the countryside for industry.
For toil in the mines, you can visit these mines today if you don't mind wearing a hard
hat.
For toil in the factories, 12-hour shifts, six and a half days a week.
Today they're museums.
And you can visit a typical one-room worker's cottage, where a man, his wife and six children
lived.
When they were out of work, they had no crops to fall back on.
Many turned to drink.
One of the blessings of the new industrialism was the steam locomotive.
Railroads began binding the world together with a network of track.
At Bridge North Station, you can board the finest preserved steam railway in Britain.
For those who remember steam, it's nostalgic.
And for today's generation, it's a trip into the golden age of railroading.
The track runs some 16 scenic miles.
Gazing through the rail carriage window, it's obvious that in the post-industrial age, farming
has made a beautiful comeback in Shropshire.
Westward along the Severn, England's longest river, to the place where the Severn loops
the lovely Tudor town of Shrewsbury.
Half-timbered houses, even the street names cry out from another century.
Butcher Road.
Fish Street.
Across the Shropshire moorlands lies a neighbouring country whose patron is St David, whose flower
is the leek and whose national emblem is the Celtic harp.
Wales, stronghold of the ancient Celts, where Gaelic, a tongue of poets, is still the national
language.
There was no better spokesman for his native Wales than the late Richard Burton.
This is my country, Wales.
Sheep herding is still an important part of the Welsh economy.
In Wales, there are said to be three sheep to every one person.
Shepherds are justly proud of their sharp-witted dogs and bring them regularly to the sheepdog
trials.
It's a place to come and see a tense game of skill and control.
At the moment of truth, it's a battle of wills between sheep and sheepdog.
It's our first sport and second religion, rugby football.
It's tough and exciting.
Canarbon Castle.
Bestiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales took place in this courtyard setting.
I, Charles Prince of Wales, do become your liegeman of life and limb and of earthly worship
and faith and truth I will bear unto thee to live and die against all manner of folks.
Across blue Llyn Padarn, Snowdon itself rises, proudly the highest mountain in all England
and Wales.
Here is the heart of Wales with more than enough beauty to share it out generously amongst
her friends.
But the whole of Wales is my heritage.
The Rose Counties, a swath across north central England from sea to sea.
Liverpool.
Though this city was chartered in the 13th century, its look and feel is modern.
After visiting great Gothic cathedrals, Liverpool's Roman Catholic cathedral emerges as a pet
paragon of contemporary church design.
It is built over a vast crypt where a six tonne circular stone seals the tombs of deceased
archbishops.
With seven miles of waterfront on the Mersey estuary, Liverpool is a thriving Atlantic
port.
It was the last port that masses of European immigrants saw before sighting the Statue
of Liberty.
It's also a first port for new ideas from abroad in pop art and pop music.
With some exaggeration, American poet Allen Ginsberg called Liverpool the centre of human
consciousness.
That's why those four Liverpoolians in need of haircuts got their act together here.
The Liverpool Tourist Office sponsors trips to the homes where the lads grew up.
John Lennon's, Paul's, George's, Ringo's.
There's a replica of the Cavern Nightclub where they began their career as a group.
Liverpool is the holy city of Fetalmania.
In the Cumbrian Mountains, gathering waters rush downward into 16 ice age lakes of incomparable
beauty.
Nature took millions of years to carve out the Lake District, the loveliest region in
a lovely land.
The poet Wordsworth lived here, convinced that human dignity and freedom lay in a communion
with nature.
It is a sense of majesty and beauty and repose, a blend of holiness, of earth and sky.
The district is now a national park.
Despite the numbers of visitors it attracts, it remains unspoiled.
To the east lies the walled city of York with its great cathedral.
York was once the Viking capital of England.
Train buffs flock to the National Railway Museum here.
Its collection of old locomotives and rolling stock is superb.
This train belonged to the royal family.
One can get a peek into its sumptuous railway carriages.
The wind-blashed Yorkshire moors, strangely beautiful in their desolation, draw visitors
versed in the poems and novels of the Brontes.
Clinging to the top of a hill is the village of Haworth.
Near the church stands a parsonage where in 1820 the Reverend Patrick Bronte brought his
family to live.
A museum today, it's open to visitors.
The mother died tragically, leaving a son, three daughters and her husband, who brooded
in seclusion for the rest of his life.
Charlotte, the eldest daughter, did her best to look after the others.
Emily, though desperately shy, was the most brilliant of the three.
And the youngest was sensitive and gentle.
They had no inkling that the poems and novels that they wrote in secret in this room would
one day haunt the memories of millions of readers.
Almost every person and place they knew found their way into their writings.
It was from the lonely moors that Emily drew her inspiration.
The breeze that stirs the grasses here on Wuthering Heights carried on its breath the
voices of Heathcliff and Cathy.
Going south now through the shires toward London.
Fabled Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, this is Robin Hood country.
But a lot has changed since Robin and his merry men romped in these parts.
Yet a trip to the Jerusalem pub can be a pleasant step into the past.
It was cut into the solid rock of Nottingham Castle, making it the oldest pub in Britain.
Cambridge, where tourists can view the colleges while punting beneath the willows on the River
Camp.
Founded in 1284, a roll call of Cambridge University alumni is Staggering, Chaucer,
Milton, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and just as proudly, Nehru, the first Prime Minister
of the Republic of India.
Only 21 miles from London lies sprawling Windsor Castle, edged by the picturesque town of Windsor.
A side trip to Runnymede allows a visit to the John F. Kennedy Memorial, a gift of the
British people.
And the passionate enthusiasm which he brought to his labors gave courage, inspiration, and
above all, new hope.
With all our hearts, my people shared his triumph, grieved at his reverses, and wept
at his death.
It's Sunday afternoon, and a band concert is in progress on the east terrace of Windsor
Castle.
Windsor Castle is a huge place, covering 13 acres.
This facade is an array of towers built by British monarchs through the centuries.
To the royal family that lives here, it's a homestead holding volumes of personal memories.
On Sundays, several of the rooms are open to visitors.
400 years ago, Queen Elizabeth I commanded that Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor
be performed for her in this room, now called the Waterloo Chamber.
It's the same room where Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret as children performed
amateur pantomimes for their royal parents.
During the late 1930s, Elizabeth grew up at Windsor.
It was at Windsor that Elizabeth was wooed by handsome Prince Philip of Greece.
In Windsor Great Park these days, Prince Philip is seen practicing the colorful sport of driving
teams of horses for which he's won many trophies.
And it was from Windsor in 1936 that Elizabeth's uncle, King Edward VIII, broadcast his abdication,
giving up his crown to his brother for the woman he loved.
Edward rocked the British monarchy.
Edward had grown up a golden child, groomed to reign over the greatest empire on earth,
and he was used to getting his own way.
As the bachelor prince of Wales, he was a fairy tale prince of modern myth and prize
catch for any princess.
He ascended the throne when he was 44 and announced that he would take to wife an American
divorcee, Wallace Warfield Simpson, and make her his queen.
The prime minister and the archbishop of Canterbury forbade it.
Edward didn't get his own way.
From a small room in Windsor in which he'd played as a child, he broadcast his abdication
to the peoples of the British Empire.
Edward said, I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility
and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do.
But I'm to help and support of the woman I love.
And now we all have a new king.
God save the king.
Edward married Mrs. Simpson and went into exile.
The title with which he and the woman he loved lived out their days was the Duke and Duchess
of Windsor, the pulse and capital of Great Britain.
This is London.
From the wharf of the Tower of London, the Honorable Artillery Company is firing a 41
gun salute.
The Tower of London is a great fortress created by William the Conqueror 900 years ago.
It is the single most popular tourist attraction in the old world.
Over the centuries, it has functioned as a palace, an armory, a record office of the
king's justice, and today, treasury of the crown jewels.
The yeoman warters who guard the jewels are popularly known as bee feeders.
Their fluted collars and red tunics are as emblematic of Britain as the Union Jack.
They're always there to give help and information.
While a prison and place of execution, the tower got a grisly reputation.
This reads like a who's who of Tudor England.
Among the numbers of heads that rolled here were those of Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia,
Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, and his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, and the
Earl of Essex, suitor of the first Queen Elizabeth.
River Thames is straddled by the giant city, the famous London bridges shackling its banks.
Tower Bridge has become a symbol of the river.
Mark Friar's bridge offers a fine view of St. Paul's Cathedral.
Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to rebuild the old St. Paul's, which had been destroyed
in London's great fire of 1666.
The architect is buried in the cathedral.
His epitaph reads in Latin, here lies Sir Christopher Wren.
If you would see his monument, look around you.
St. Paul's was chosen for Prince Charles' wedding, as opposed to Westminster Abbey because
the cathedral can hold more guests.
2,500 people were invited to attend the ceremony.
At Westminster Bridge lie the Houses of Parliament and the clock that Londoners set their watches
by.
Parliament is housed in the Palace of Westminster.
This has been its home since 1547.
During 50 years thereafter, Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the place with gunpowder.
Ever since, the event's been celebrated with bonfires on Guy Fawkes Day.
Where else but in England would a man be so celebrated for trying to blow up the government?
The House of Commons, where the gritty tasks of government are debated.
Throughout this chamber, great voices have rung.
Lloyd George's.
Churchill's.
The cornerstone of the kingdom, Westminster Abbey.
For nine centuries, English royalty has been certified in this ancient church.
In stupendous weddings, outcomes of royal matchmaking, and just a cold breath away,
certified in death.
But the most vital certification in a monarchy is the crowning of a new sovereign.
This oak throne, scarred and worn, was made in 1300 for the crowning of Edward I.
It's been the choicest seat at coronations ever since.
I here present unto you Queen Elizabeth, your undoubted queen.
Well for all you who are come this day to do your homage and service, are you willing
to do the same?
One, two, three.
There's a niche in the Abbey for the royalty of writers, the laurel-crowned peers of literature.
Writers grow fond of poets' corner.
Geoffrey Chaucer is entombed here, as are many of England's greatest writers.
Among these titans of pen and typewriter, the American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has
been given place.
Just wandering on foot through London's side streets and little lanes can be excursions
into warm memories of books that we've read and bits of poetry that have stayed with us.
Samuel Johnson's house is tucked away on a small court.
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.
It was in a house on Wimpole Street that Robert Browning courted Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.
On tight street in Chelsea lived playwright and wit Oscar Wilde.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being
talked about.
The American author of Poor Richard's Almanac dwelt in this house during his stay in London.
For mystery fans, grounded in the old London of pea-soot fogs and grisly crimes to be solved,
there are streets and places as familiar as Big Ben's bonging.
Scotland Yard and the street where fictional Sherlock Holmes shared a flat with Dr. Watson.
After clicking sightseers gather at the gates of the Queen's official London home, Buckingham
Palace.
At eleven o'clock each weekday morning, the ceremonious changing of the guard.
The Buckingham Palace balcony must be the most famous balcony in the world and certainly
the most photographed.
One of royalty's most frequent public duties, waving.
But public kissing?
In Queen Victoria's time, this was against the law in London.
It was Prime Minister Gladstone who first advised that the best way to see London is
from the top of a red double deck bus.
There's always a bobby about to give directions.
A colossus of Admiral Lord Nelson gazing out with indifference to the traffic snarl below.
That same Sea Dog Nelson who, in 1815, won and died at the Battle of Trafalgar.
This is Trafalgar Square, the hub of London.
Money lenders in the 13th century staked out this area as the city's financial district,
which in recent centuries has been warded by the Bank of England, that old lady of Threadneedle
Street.
London Stock Exchange is the financial powerhouse of the old world.
There are over 120 worthwhile museums and galleries in London.
Some are more rewarding to the visitor or more exhausting than the British Museum.
It was founded by an active parliament in 1753 and ever since, collectibles of every
land and era have been flowing in.
A museum of a different sort is Madame Tussauds, the most celebrated waxworks in the world.
Skilled and meticulous care go into crafting these uncannily lifelike figures.
Madame Tussauds, who had lived through the French Revolution, began her waxworks with
a figure of Marie Antoinette, for which she used the guillotined Queen's head for the
modelling.
In 1835, she brought her waxworks to London.
Who-done-it fans get more than a clue as to what this famous writer of mysteries looked
like.
A macabre exhibit, but fascinating, a recreation of Jack the Ripper's London, the Ten Bells
Pub.
The wet, gaslit streets where the city's most notorious criminal mutilated his victims with
the skill and deftness of a surgeon.
This is the neighbourhood that he terrorised, London's East End.
The Ten Bells Pub is still here, doing a lively business, thank you.
Pop in for a pie and a pint.
Over a century has passed and the Ripper's identity is still a mystery.
Amateur sleuths with pet theories about the Ripper are welcome to look around during daylight.
The big city is cushioned by swarms of green, emerald islands and a sea of brick and stone.
These parks are the lungs of London.
St James' Park, spreading out from Buckingham Palace, is London's oldest royal park.
Once it belonged to King Henry VIII, who claimed this vast wooded preserve for hunting forays.
Today it belongs to the people.
It was Charles I who opened 360-acre Hyde Park to the public.
Perhaps in appreciation, there are gun salutes on all the royal birthdays.
London is the green of its parks, the scarlet of its royal pageants and the imperial grey
granite of its history.
But what of the clown-faced colours of life in the Warrens of Brompton or Bloomsbury,
Chelsea or Covent Garden?
In Covent Garden, London is theatre.
Out on the streets.
As in the playhouses.
Noon.
And night.
The neighbourhoods of Covent Garden exude a kind of magic.
The
royal opera house Covent Garden.
One of the city's most venerable showplaces.
Its lobby a gallery of mementos of past performances.
Caruso.
Melba.
Geely.
Callus.
Today, it's the home of the Royal Ballet and current productions vie with those of the
past in brilliance.
It was in Covent Garden that the first Punch and Judy show made its noisy debut.
Punch's shenanigans have been tickling kids for a scope of centuries.
A delight to visitors and a daily diversion for Londoners, the irrepressible Covent Garden
market.
It was in this market in George Bernard Shaw's popular comedy, Pygmalion, that Professor
Higgins meets Eliza Doolittle, a cockney when she sells flowers.
The rest is theatrical history.
The play Pygmalion went on to become My Fair Lady, one of the most popular musicals of
all time.
London lists to St. Paul's, the Great Cathedral and St. Paul's Covent Garden.
This is the actor's church.
Here British artists of stage and screen are remembered even after the public has forgotten
them.
In Piccadilly Circus, theatre is London.
Radiating from Piccadilly's light-spangled hub are a host of playhouses running premium
ticket shows, some destined to become next season's Broadway hits and after that perhaps
blockbuster movies.
But they're premiered in London.
Theatre going here is a ceiling nightcap to the London experience.
Through the heady sights of London, back to the heart of England, through Oxfordshire
and Warwickshire.
In miles the distances are short.
In history it's a span of centuries.
Of all great universities in the English-speaking world, Oxford is the most renowned.
A visitor can spend days just wandering through its colleges, libraries and museums.
Such diverse intellects as Thomas Moores and Oscar Wildes were honed here.
During the 1700s, a student here named John Wesley organized a student group of devout
Christians.
They were nicknamed the Methodists.
Today Wesley's Methodism has spread throughout the world.
Charles Dodgson was an Oxford Math professor.
On his sabbaticals he wrote Alice in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
Spreading from the shores of a man-made lake in Oxfordshire are 2700 acres of parkland
belonging to Blenheim Palace.
Blenheim, seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, a baroque palace of magnificent proportions
surrounded by formal gardens.
What draws visitors here is an interest in Winston Churchill.
It happened that he was born at Blenheim.
The rooms are sumptuous, all 320 of them befitting the great Dukes of Marlborough from whom Winston
was descended on his father's side.
But the most visited room of all is Winston Churchill's.
Visitors from the United States are reminded that a good deal of American blood flowed
through Winston Churchill's veins, that his mother was warm-blooded Jenny Jerome of New
York, that Douglas MacArthur was a distant cousin, and that Winston's great-great-great-grandmother
was a full-blooded Iroquois Indian.
It's more than half-timbered houses with Tudor gables that draw half a million visitors to
Stratford-upon-Avon each year.
It's the dust of Shakespeare.
There were no theatre buildings in this old market town when William Shakespeare was born
on Henley Street in 1564.
Today, there's the splendid Royal Shakespeare Theatre, with performances given from March
through November.
Young Shakespeare had to trek a mile to court Anne Hathaway at the thatch, wattle, and daub
cottage of her parents.
But he left wife Anne and their children and went to London in pursuit of a theatrical
career.
When he returned to Stratford to retire many years later, he had created a body of work
unparalleled in human achievement.
Shakespeare's retirement was short-lived.
He died on his birthday in 1616 and was buried in Holy Trinity Parish.
He must have loved Stratford, for in his plays and poems there are so many references to
flowers, foliage, sights, and sounds that abound here.
His first acquaintance with the feudal world of Hotspur and Falstaff and Prince Hal, whom
he immortalized in his historical plays, may have been here, at nearby Warwick Castle,
perched on a rocky crag above the River Avon.
For visitors with a stomach for it, there's a groan-by-groan tour of the castle's torture
chamber.
Perhaps it was a glimpse of this place that inspired Shakespearean lines such as the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Undoubtedly he'd have recognized Warwick Castle as it stands today.
What Shakespeare would find changed is the cathedral city of Coventry, only 19 miles
from Stratford.
But he'd be quick to grasp how Coventry came to be a symbol of the resilience of the English
people.
November 1940.
Coventry is blitzed in a devastating air raid by Hitler's Luftwaffe.
After the destruction of its 14th century cathedral, the city's proud and ancient history
goes up in smoke.
What remained of the old cathedral was rebuilt after the war with the help of young volunteer
workers from Germany.
On the wall behind the cross it reads, Father, Forgive.
By the early 1960s, a new Coventry cathedral arose, embracing all denominations.
A masterpiece of modern architecture rising from a medieval rubble to the heights of England's
faith in the future and in itself.
The England that Shakespeare had written of four centuries ago.
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, this precious stone set in the silver sea,
this happy breed of men, this little world, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm,
this England.
those lilting place names that roll off the tongue like a warm raindrop, those counties
celebrated with sweet tea sentiment in tin pan alley ballads that make up today's Republic
of Ireland.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is The
Seeing it on a map, this island looks as though it might be breaking away from the British
Isles to make it on its own in the rough, grey Atlantic.
The high kingdoms of Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connacht, Arran and Gaelic, and to us,
the Republic of Ireland, taking up 80% of the island.
Not very big, 150 miles across and 315 miles from top to bottom, supporting 3.5 million
souls.
Welcome to Ireland!
The fabled Ring of Kerry.
Cork, site of the Blarney Stone, which pilgrims suffer backache and vertigo to kiss.
Wexford, ancestral home of John F. Kennedy.
Gaelic Galway.
And the bleak Isles of Arran.
Wild Connemara.
Sligo, in the breath of poets.
Donegal, the Atlantic lapping at its doorstep.
The fair Dublin town, the friendliest capital on earth.
The golf lovers Ireland.
And especially, the horse lovers Ireland.
The poets Ireland, for this is a land of poets and wordsmiths, where eloquence is more highly
regarded than affluence.
So that we try to feed a habit for everything, until the ego puppets, the militaries, mirror
our own warring face.
Through little peace.
Named after the island's longest river, Shannon Airport is the gateway to the Irish Republic
when jetting over the Atlantic.
This country boasts of some 900 castles.
And just a mossy stone's throw from the airport rises a huge hulk called Bunratty, that's
been re-hammered to its medieval glories.
Clamped onto the castle bridge is Dirty Nellie's pub, dating from 1620.
But County Clare has more to offer than Nellie's hospitality.
The cliffs of Moher, a five mile palisade of sheer rock rising out of the sea.
And the Alwy Cave, with stalactites a million years in the sculpting.
The bones of hibernating bears have been found here.
Bears have been extinct in Ireland for more than a thousand years.
Fifteen miles to the west of the airport stand the walls of Limerick.
Limerick is the fourth largest city in the Republic, and a familiar name to anyone who
ever made a witty verse in English.
There was a fair Irish city that lent its name to a ditty.
On one side of the Shannon the city is called English Town, on the other side, Irish Town.
Nearby Adair is one of the loveliest villages in the land.
This forceful piece of sculpture is of Daniel O'Connell, and it stands on a street in Limerick
that's been named after him.
O'Connell is memorialized throughout the Republic as the Liberator.
But Liberator of whom?
Who then are these irrepressible people who populate the Republic?
What dazzling concoction of wizardry and whiskey in the wee folk bubbled up as the Irish race?
Long long ago, beyond the misty space of twice a thousand years, in Aeronol there dwelt a
mighty race taller than Roman spears.
Here in there were leprechauns and bog spirits more than five thousand years ago.
When Bronze Age men buried their dead here at Newgrange in County Meath, then the Celts,
fierce but canny, invaded from Central Europe and took over the island.
They were fighters, the Celts, and splendid horsemen.
Here on the Hill of Tara, also in County Meath, their high kings held every third year great
assemblies.
For two thousand years, Tara was Ireland's political powerhouse and most sacred pagan
shrine.
Now came another conqueror, but of a different sort.
Patrick was born in Roman Britain and had been shunted to Ireland as a slave when he
was only sixteen.
He somehow got away.
In the year 432 he returned as a missionary armed with the cross and the word.
Here on the Hill of Slane, he lit a pascal fire and proclaimed his mission to the pagan
Irish.
The Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary had been a place of worship going back to the
Gaelic beginnings.
Kings were crowned here.
Here Patrick baptized the High King of Munster and the royal family, and it was on Cashel
that Patrick likened the Trinity to the three leaves of a shamrock.
The new faith brush-fired over the land.
Monasteries arose, great depositories of Greco-Roman and Christian learning.
Irish monks, the most scholarly in Christendom, fanned out over Europe.
More invaders.
In AD 795, Norsemen swooped down on Ireland in their long, dragon-proud ships.
Their minds were unbooted, not books.
They ravaged the monks, the monasteries, and the pretty Colleens.
Their raiding bled on for two centuries.
But the Vikings weren't all fire and broadsword.
They settled down to become traders and founded the cities of Dublin, Wexford, Cork, and Limerick.
Strongbow the Norman was the island's next conqueror in 1171.
The following year, King Henry II of England staked out Ireland with Norman castles.
So began the entrenchment of English rule.
Eerie, a moonscape perhaps?
No it isn't the pocked surface of the moon.
It's the Burren in County Clare.
As bleak and forbidding as the somber history that it calls to mind.
In the 1600s, the Catholic majority of Ireland revolted against their English masters.
With 20,000 troops, Oliver Cromwell vowed to drive the rebels to hell or connacht.
By 1652, he'd massacred a third of Ireland's Catholics.
Those spared were sold into slavery in the West Indies.
On his march over the Burren, the complaint was heard.
Not enough wood to hang a man, not enough water to drown him, and not enough clay to
cover his corpse.
Yes, the Irish prayed for a liberator.
Sadly, a century passed before he emerged.
Of him, we'll see more.
Going around in circles can be a joy, if you're circling the ring of Kerry.
If it's clockwise you're going, then it's south on the Kenmore Road from Killarney,
through Killarney National Park, to Derryne, to St. Finans and Ballyskelog's Bays, and
rounding it out at Killarglan, about 110 miles in all, the most traveled scenic route in
Ireland.
If you detour via the Conner Pass, the ring can be bent northward to include Trolley and
Ballybunion.
Killarney National Park, Ireland's own lake country, miles and miles of glorious lakes
sparkling under restless changing skies.
McGillicuddy's Peaks, the highest range of mountains in the land.
Overlands.
Ocean currents keep the climate here mild, making for lush ferns and mosses, forming
homes for leprechauns.
This park holds the largest growth of natural woodlands remaining in Ireland.
It's ruins now, but he was born here, in County Kerry in 1775, Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator.
His ancestral home is here at Derryne.
He was a powerful orator, O'Connell.
In 1828 he was elected to Parliament, but he was not allowed to take the seat.
He had won because he was Catholic.
But the movement he championed was of such force that it scared London.
O'Connell was elected again and this time seated in the House of Commons.
Brilliantly he accomplished the emancipation of Ireland's Catholics.
Then he set himself to repealing the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain.
O'Connell was committed to reform and to activism within the law.
But as a leader he was dedicated to change without violence.
But when he died in 1847, Ireland had yet to win its full freedom from Great Britain.
Rough, dramatic, the Dingle Peninsula jutting bravely into the wild Atlantic.
These waters are a graveyard for ships.
A recent find was the wreck of the Santa Maria de la Rosa, a ship of the Spanish Armada that
foundered in Blassett Sound.
Dingle itself is a fishing town, lively, with plenty of tasty seafood.
Today's dinglers reside in dwellings undistinguishable from those of the rest of Ireland.
But their ancient ancestors settled down in these unmortared beehive huts.
They're called clockens.
With tourism there are options other than a beehive hut or a homey B&B.
Some tourists see Dingle from Romany-like caravans, in imitation of a peculiar Irish
breed.
These young vacationers are from Sweden.
They've rented a barrel-top wagon.
They're adopting the lifestyle of a people once called Tinkers.
But who prefer to be called travelers.
They're part of the landscape, the traveling people, about 20,000 of them wandering in
wagons and vans.
No man's with their animals.
But note, they are not gypsies.
No one's really certain where they came from.
No one is accounted for their language, called Kant, for these people speak a language of
their own.
Whatever their origins, these traveling people have a rich and different culture.
Tralee is County Kerry's biggest town.
And it's never busier than in late summer, when the Festival of Kerry is held.
It draws from around the world.
Hibernian ladies from several continents.
As the world over, most everyone is familiar with the words and melody of the Rose of Tralee.
Who is most like the Rose of the song?
Lovely young women from all over Ireland and the world are here to prove that they are.
And to match charms in a competition for the Festival crown.
Among the Irish counties, there's a culleen from Chicago.
They're here from all over the globe.
Melbourne, New South Wales, Toronto, Texas, California.
It's Ireland's biggest bash.
Ballybunyon means town of the sapling in Gaelic, but to the Irish it means holidays, seaside
holidays.
It lays sunbathing on a coastline of sandy beaches and jagged cliffs.
Old Lick Castle is a landmark of the grounds for which Ballybunyon is best known.
It's golf courses.
There are two 18-hole courses here.
Some say that the old course is one of the ten toughest in the world.
It's a wild place, a terrain as it was a thousand years ago, where River Shannon meets the ocean.
Tall grasses cover dunes that pitch and roll.
Golfers, welcome to Ballybunyon.
When listing the fabled counties of the Irish Republic, it's usually Cork that comes first
to mind.
Cork, on the Celtic Sea.
Toward the Irish Sea are Cork's easterly neighbors, County Waterford and County Wexford.
Cork, a coastline of jagged rock with bays deep enough for the big ships, inviting towns
and villages folded into green hills and fields of fertile farmland.
What County Cork is best known for is the most celebrated chunk of rock in the world,
a five-foot block of limestone in the parapet of Blarney Castle.
Elizabeth I of England unwittingly christened it the Blarney Stone.
The Queen had commanded Dermot McCarthy to hand over this castle, but McCarthy kept putting
her off with sweet talk.
Exasperated, the Queen exclaimed,
That man's nothing but Blarney.
Today's pilgrims climb to the height of the battlements, empty their pockets of loose
valuables and clinging precariously to guardrails, lie down and arch back to kiss the surface
of the magic stone.
The payoff?
The gift of eloquence.
It's the second city.
That's the city of Cork by the River Lee, with a continental air and a population of
140,000.
A hilly, bustling, testy kind of town with waterways all around.
Cork citizens have a fierce sense of identity.
This set of Cork, it's God's own place and the devil's own people.
Just 15 minutes from the city of Cork stands Cove.
Its harbor handles the big ships.
Cove's maritime history is notable and often in human terms strangely tragic.
Cove was the Titanic's last port of call before it sailed into its tragedy.
Surveying Cove today offers no clue to the place of the potato in its history, but here
the port and the potato, or one of them, are fused.
After the discovery of the Americas, an edible tuber made its way from the new to the old
world.
Sir Walter Raleigh returned from his Virginia expedition with potato tubers, which were
planted here, on the grounds of Castle Matrix, the first grown in Ireland.
The Irish peasant had been dreadfully undernourished.
Then the spud made its entrance into his life.
Here was a nutritious staple that could be grown in abundance on small plots of land.
Plain folk and the potato.
The peasant's daily diet improved.
Six pounds of potatoes and a pint of milk.
The population increased.
Gratefully they might have prayed, give us this day our daily potatoes.
Potatoes were life.
Then it struck in 1845.
A blight.
The potato crop failed, and failed, and failed, and failed again.
A great hunger fell over Ireland.
Unable to pay the rents to their London landlords, Irish underdogs were driven off the land.
The hungry ate grass.
They died of starvation and dysentery.
They died crawling in the streets, screaming for food.
Of a population of eight and a half million, one million starved to death.
Fleeing the famine, another million emigrated.
For many of them, Cobb was their last sight of Ireland.
They scrambled for steerage in what came to be called coffin ships.
Some survived to build up their blood again in Britain, in Australia, in the New World.
Emigrant ships calling at Cobb continued in the 20th century.
Into the years of World War I.
Of the busiest of those crowded liners was the Lusitania.
Then in 1915, while steaming past, can sail after embarking from Cobb.
The Lusitania was torpedoed without warning by a submarine of the Imperial German Navy.
One thousand one hundred ninety-eight human beings perished.
Several hundred of the victims were buried in the cemetery of the 12th century church
of St. Maltos.
Today there's a monument to those who perished.
A reminder that the splendid port city of Cobb has been fraught with tragedy.
But it's also been a port of hope from the degrading hunger from the coffin ships and
the stifling steerage emerged the survivors.
They peopled the burgeoning cities of North America, New York, Chicago, Boston.
At first they just managed to survive.
In time, they prevailed.
Stungenstown, County Wexford, Republic of Ireland.
In 1848, a lad named Kennedy left this homestead, a thatched cottage at the time, to try his
luck in America.
In 1963, Kennedy's great-grandson made a pilgrimage to his ancestral home.
So now my wife and I prepare for a new administration and for a new baby.
Thank you.
The Irish loved U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
They felt that he was one of their own.
In his name, they've created a living memorial.
The John F. Kennedy Arboretum, eight miles from New Ross in the southeast corner of Ireland.
Here grow trees and shrubs and plants in abundance, many donated from around the world.
In a larger sense, this forest commemorates the great fulfillment after the great hunger.
The name Waterford, as in County Waterford, rings throughout the world's boutiques from
the elegant crystal produced at Waterford City's Glassworks.
It's the largest glass factory in the world.
3,000 visitors a week watch as the ingredients are mixed, shaped, and with consummate skill,
cut in the unique patterns that are a hallmark of Waterford.
Where swans patrol them, the waters of Loch Corrib are calm.
But these waters surge wildly when spilling into Galway Bay.
Between Loch Corrib and the sea, they're thick with salmon.
In this most sheltered corner of the bay is Galway, the most Irish city in Ireland.
Though its imposing cathedral is strictly 20th century, Galway is old.
Its beginnings were humble, a harbor and a hangout for fishermen.
But by the 13th century, it had become sufficiently prosperous to enclose itself within thick
walls to keep out the wild Irish.
Then as now, Galway bustled.
Trade, Market Street, Shop Street, Buttermilk Lane.
Once swaggering Spaniards spread it up and down these streets because the South Westerlies
brought ships here from the ports of Spain.
This was the largest parish church in medieval Ireland, dedicated to St. Nicholas, patron
of travelers by land and sea.
There's an intriguing old tale about this church.
Christopher Columbus docked in Galway Harbor and prayed in this church before embarking
westward in the Santa Maria.
Given Galway's place on sea routes, the tale isn't as far fetched as it may seem.
Today Lynch Castle is a bank.
But during the city's heyday, it was a splendiferous mansion occupied by the Lynch's, one of 14
powerful families or tribes that ruled Galway.
Indeed, it was known as the city of the tribes in those days.
Bank or Castle?
It's one of the finest old townhouses in Ireland.
This is a monument to a storyteller, a Galway-born storyteller who wrote exclusively in the Irish
language.
Porrick O'Connor.
Oh, there were those who raised an eyebrow when a monument was erected.
Old Patty was never in one place very long.
As a matter of fact, he was a bit of a hobo with a weakness for the bottle.
But his writings are much loved.
Like O'Connor, Galway is and lives a folktale.
An even deeper thrust into the Celtic twilight.
Scrattling the mouth of Galway Bay are the three islands collectively known as Aran,
strangely remote.
In distance and in time.
They're treeless.
Atlantic gales have stripped them bare.
Wild and lonely.
Yet human beings have eked out a living here for 50 centuries.
Life is hard for these islanders.
These fields, which the islanders who farm them hopefully refer to as gardens, are marked
off by irregular dry stone walls.
These boundaries go back for generations, for centuries.
Here human communities, little worlds unto themselves, subsist on potatoes, milk and
fish.
And there are wildflowers.
The people here are steeped in folkways.
Irish Gaelic is their workaday language.
Out of politeness, they will speak English to visitors.
This is the honoured kind of boat used by the locals.
The corum, made of laths and tarred canvas.
Fishermen sail far out into the open seas in these craft.
The stuff of legends these islanders are kindly but fearless people.
These are the folk of Singh's haunting play, Riders to the Sea, and of American filmmaker
Robert Flaherty's masterpiece, The Man of Aaron.
Aaron beckons visitors seeking a way of life rooted in the timeless, the unchanging.
You can explore on foot its pristine, white sand beaches, and probe the tide pools for
what the sea has left behind.
You can explore its tiny harbours, and visit the graves of fishermen unknown to you.
But in this place of crying winds and quiet courage, they're somehow kindred.
You can traverse its stony fields in a light two-wheeled carriage.
They're called Jerusalem Jeeps by the locals.
You can breathe its briny, unpolluted air while pumping a bike.
You can meander through its tidy towns where accommodations are family-run.
You can browse through its shops for heavy sweaters or white sheep's wool, traditional
Aaron knitwear.
Women of Aaron used to knit these sweaters in family patterns, and aid in identifying
the bodies of fishermen who had drowned.
This is the westernmost point of the islands.
The next landfall is New York City.
Though battered by the sea, Aaron, on the outmost rim of western Europe, remains untouched
by the turbulence of the times we live in.
Living on the island is like living in no place on Earth.
It's the only place to be.
Kanamara, a name that rolls off the tongue like honey.
It's the name given to the western part of County Callaway, stretching from Lah-Korab
to the Atlantic.
Landmarked mountains brooding over it are the Twelve Bents.
It's a haunted land.
Moors.
Hidden lakes seeming to stretch into infinity.
Lonely heaths.
Boglands.
Meandering streams.
Cataracts.
Bays as deep as the profound timelessness of Kanamara itself.
Seas of waving grass.
It's a place of few people, but with multitudes of memories, haunting memories of giants and
dwarfs and warrior kings who ruled when this was an ancient Gaelic kingdom.
Kanamara enchants.
It is more than sights and sounds.
It's a way of feeling.
Lying at the head of Clifton Bay is the market town of Clifton, population just over a thousand.
Yet it's referred to as the capital of Kanamara.
This place marks an event.
On this bog, just south of Clifton, two daring pilots crash-landed their biplane on a flight
that took off from St. John's in Newfoundland.
There were William Alcock and Arthur Witten Brown.
That was on the 15th of June, 1919, the first transatlantic flight before Lindbergh.
It is fitting that it is in Kanamara that those primal rhythms rising from the depths
of the Irish soul are being served.
Malachy Kearns makes drums, a tambourine-shaped drum called a bauhrán that's used in making
traditional Irish music.
With great care, a frame is shaped and sanded.
Skins, gold and deer the most favored, are cured in lime and mixed with ingredients that
are a guarded secret of every bauhrán maker.
Skins are soaked, scraped.
After the skin has been stretched for two or three days, it's transferred to the beech
wood frame of a bauhrán.
In times past, a sheep's leg was used as a beater.
Today, beaters are made of fine woods.
In the hands of a good player, the bauhrán can be exciting, evoking an ageless response
and a joyous one.
The region languors into summer.
Then, on the third Thursday in August, it bursts into high spirits with the Canamara
pony show.
Canamara is famous for its ponies.
Some of these ponies seem as wild as a landscape.
Legend has it that they're descended from Andalusian horses carried on board ships of
the Spanish Armada.
Horses that swam to the safety of these shores when their ships were sunk from under them.
The Irish love horses.
A good fast horse and a rider with pluck are sport.
And a social occasion as well.
At any one time in Ireland, there are about 6,000 horses in training.
From 28 race courses and over a million fans a year.
The toniest of equestrian events takes place from the first Tuesday of August through the
following Saturday.
The Royal Dublin Horse Show.
There's an Englishness about this Dublin event recalling the days when the Union Jack and
not the flag of the Irish Republic flew over these show grounds at Balls Bridge.
Another event.
The arrival of the President of the Republic.
There's a contradiction here.
The Irish fought long and hard against British kings and queens to become a republic and
elect a president as its head.
Yet this president presides over a Royal Horse Show.
Oh well, the Irish aren't ones to let a contradiction stand in the way of a good time.
Perhaps even more than by the strains of their national anthem, today's Irish are united
by the sound of a horse's hooves striking lightning from the earth.
Following the coastline north to the enchanted landscape of County Sligo, this is Yates country.
And more northerly still in Ulster, County Donegal, buffeted by the sea.
Haunting is the word for County Sligo.
A rare other world of secret places of specters and spirits where belief in the supernatural
is taken for granted.
Sligo is old, staggeringly old.
At Karamore sprawls a vast Bronze Age burial ground going back 40 centuries.
Cairns, dolmens.
It was in Sligo that Nobel Prize winning poet William Butler Yates spent his summers as
a youth.
Here his imagination caught fire.
Here at Loch Gill where Yates probed the soul of Ireland's Celtic past.
Rhymes more than their rhyming tale of things discovered in the deep, where only bodies
lay to sleep.
Yates hated old age.
Yet he grew old.
He hated the idea of dying.
Yet he died.
He's buried in the churchyard at Drumcliff under a piece of Sligo limestone chiseled
with an epitaph that he himself had written.
Cast a cold eye on life.
On death.
The first man passed by.
Where there are sheep, there's wool.
And Donegal is one of the best places in Ireland to buy tweeds.
The Atlantic pounding at its doorstep, County Donegal has launched fishing fleets.
The fighting O'Donnell clan into the maelstrom of Irish history.
Respect for the sea is profound.
Independence fierce.
Irish is spoken here.
More people speak the Irish language in Donegal than in any other county in the Republic.
But the Donegal dialect has much in common with the Gaelic spoken in the Scottish Highlands.
Indeed, Donegal has strong ties with Scotland.
In Christian times, it came to be known as the Blessed Well.
But Dunewell is pagan.
Pilgrims wind bits of clothing and personal effects onto nearby bushes, masking the foliage
with frippery.
Then they circle Dunewell ritualistically.
The belief in the curative powers of the well's waters goes deeper than the well itself.
Down to the Druids of Donegal.
The blessing of the fleet at Kilibeg's is more in keeping with the Irish faith.
Kilibeg's, meaning the little churches, is a natural harbor in a sheltering inlet of
Donegal Bay and an important port in the herring trade.
The fishing fleet merits the blessing of a bishop for calm waters and a full harvest
from the sea.
Eastern Ireland, facing the Irish Sea, abounds in sights just an hour or so from the capital.
But the dearest sight is Dublin itself, full of churches, pubs and pluck.
Seventy-three miles southwest of Dublin is a jewel on the banks of the River Nor.
Kilkenny was once the capital of the Irish Confederation.
Though its population stands at only 10,000, little Kilkenny insists on being regarded
as a full-grown city.
City or town, it's a treasure of medieval haunts.
Dublin's neighboring county, Wicklow, is graced by the refinements, the tastes and
fancies of another age.
Powers Court.
This is one of the last great formal gardens of the Old World.
Flowing from east to west is the River Liffey.
In its meanderings, its waters become musky and as green as Ireland itself.
From its banks and from an overflow of history sprang Dublin Town, Dublin's fair city.
But it all started with the river.
In heartfelt gratitude to the river, today's city fathers commissioned this magnificent
fountain.
This promptly christened it the Flusi in the Jacuzzi.
Population?
A tad under a million, including suburbs.
Seat of Dublin County, province of Leinster.
True, it's been a capital only since 1921, but it's the one capital Ireland's ever had.
And it's the most hospitable bustle bug on earth.
Bridges link the city's north to south.
This arching cast iron footpaths call the Haypenny, recalling the time when a half penny
was charged for a crossing.
Centuries ago, the ninth to be exact, there was no city here.
Then Vikings invaded and built a stronghold at a place called Darkpool, Dove Lynn in Gaelic.
The name stuck.
The town the Vikings built, which had been buried for centuries, stood between Christchurch
and the river.
During the 1970s it was excavated, remains of houses, walls.
It was though an engulfed town surfaced before our eyes.
Shields, axeheads, combs, bowls and spoons, coins and locks, masks.
As well as being marauders, Vikings were merchants.
Dubliners can't resist breathing some high spirits into their city's murky beginnings.
In a recreated Viking village at the excavation site, players with a bent for history portray
their ancestral Dublin Danes.
Of course that's always me shellfish.
Breathe!
Do you hear me talking to you?
These people don't want fish now will you?
They do.
What do you mean they do?
You see, they all eat fish.
You've never met these people before.
Every single one of them.
How do you know these people?
I know by looking at them.
I do, of course.
You're such a stupid old woman.
I'm not being stupid.
Will you go along after that?
No, I'm supposed to have...
Go along there please.
Here the visitor joins in a reliving of early Dublin life in the housing of the times.
Historically these Vikings became Christians and intermarried with the Irish.
In the 12th century Normans arrived by way of England, but they established power only
over a strip of land on the east coast known as the Pale.
Anything outside of it was referred to as beyond the Pale.
Dublin Castle was begun by England's King John and medieval Dublin grew up around it.
Starting with the reign of the first Elizabeth, it was England's foothold in the territorial
conquest of the Irish island.
As seen today, Dublin Castle wears architectural add-ons of 18th century elegance.
The 18th century saw Dublin's golden age.
The cornerstone of Parliament House was laid in 1728.
Though one of the statues that ornament it represents wisdom, it was folly for the Irish
Parliament to vote itself out of existence as it did in 1801 when its befuddled MPs passed
the act of union with Great Britain.
From then on, Ireland was governed from London.
Founded in the 12th century, St. Patrick's Cathedral has had several face-lifters since.
It's the largest church in Ireland standing on the site where Patrick himself baptized
500 pagan Irish into the faith.
Oliver Cromwell had shown his contempt for the Irish by stabling his horses inside.
Starting in 1713, these sacred precincts were a seat of literary assaults, of razor-sharp
tracts that slashed into the injustice of the times.
That is, for the 35 years that Jonathan Swift was dean here.
Swift is renowned for his classic Gulliver's Travels, but his brilliant irony was simply
too much for the readers of his day.
He's buried here in St. Pat's.
Trinity College was founded by England's Elizabeth I on the site of a monastery that had been
sacked by her father, Henry VIII.
In the 1750s, it got a facelift.
For over four centuries, Trinity College has been a beehive of higher learning and endless
talk.
It's a 40-acre campus.
Trinity's library houses Old Ireland's highest artistic achievement, the Book of Kells.
These ninth-century renderings of the Gospels are bound into four volumes.
Each day, with loving care, another page of dazzling beauty is turned for the visitor
to behold.
The busy O'Connell Street Bridge couples the city's nitty-gritty north side with its gentrified
south side.
The dominant colossus is of the man himself, Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator.
Parnell's remembered in a city square named after him.
Charles Stuart Parnell championed home rule for Ireland in the British House of Commons.
Parnell's shining career was tarnished when it came out that he'd been carrying on for
years with a woman named Kitty, who was married to a Captain O'Shea.
The American Revolution has its Liberty Bell.
The French its Bastille.
But only Dublin could turn this granite hulk of a post office into a shrine to liberty.
A shrine consecrated by Irish blood.
1916, the Monday after Easter.
Dublin's main post office was besieged by a band of patriots, just 150 of them, some
armed awkwardly with old rifles.
They were teachers, intellectuals, idealists, talkers, not terrorists.
On the steps they boldly proclaimed an Irish Republic.
Complete independence from Great Britain.
Most of the Dubliners who bothered to listen refused to take them seriously.
But there was looting.
British soldiers were sent in.
Arrests were made.
What had been an outburst of bluster suddenly became grim.
On the third day of May, leader Porrick Pierce and two others were shot by a British firing
squad.
The next day, more were executed.
And more, and more, and more.
Things changed.
As the poet Yeats wrote, all changed, changed utterly.
A terrible beauty is born.
The rebels were no longer comic.
They had become martyrs.
Those firing squads triggered half a decade of civil war.
Then on December 5, 1921, 800 years of Englishmen trying to impose royal rule on their Irish
neighbors came to a halt.
At last, Ireland was free.
This scarred old building is still in use as a post office.
Fashionable Dublin still basks in the glow of a vanished age.
It's a city for strolling.
A city of graceful squares and the welcoming doors of Dublin.
Richly painted Georgian entrances radiating fan lights and embellished with polished brass.
Some of these doorways lead to the cradles of famous and sometimes infamous writers.
The poet Yeats was born at number 5, Sandymount Avenue.
Notorious for his rapier wit, Oscar Wilde was born at number 21, Westland Row.
Though Dublin is something more than a bats flight from Transylvania, novelist Bram Stoker
was born here.
He wrote Dracula.
George Bernard Shaw first learned the ABCs of the language he used so brilliantly at
number 33, Sing Street.
Here on Leinster Lawn is where Shaw played hooky as a schoolboy.
The National Gallery, housing a collection of splendid works, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Goya,
El Greco.
The National Gallery was the place to which Bernard Shaw owed his early education, so
he claimed.
Shaw, whose plays had tickled audiences into a higher social consciousness, left a third
of his estate to the National Gallery.
That's considerable, taking into account the royalties from such works as Pygmalion, which
was made into one of the biggest money-making musicals in theatrical history.
My Fair Lady.
There's a back door Dublin too, north of the Liffey.
This is the grubby Dublin of Sean O'Casey, master of the tragic comic in his plays The
Plough and the Stars, and Juno and the Peacock.
Parrots are running instead, two pence for 30 pence.
Brash.
I hope I don't break that bloody camera.
I generally do.
Lively.
I'm over Gays Face, watch.
And buoyed with wit as colorful as its stalls of produce, the down-to-earth Dublin of the
Moore Street market.
Who's got the sense of humor?
We all have.
Just one day of time for us.
This venerable market is manned by weathered Amazons, crones from the cabbage patch, who
through more decades than they dare add up have seen it all.
I'm too yuppie for her.
Marjana.
Say Marjana.
From the lush youthful strawberry, all juice and sugar, to the dusty potato, as old and
lumpy as the earth.
Toad dear, pound there the sown tomatoes.
That house painter turned word painter, Brendan Behan, knew well the Moore Street market.
Its cheek.
Its smells.
Its cadences.
Behan had turned to the stage, as had so many other Irish writers before him, helping to
make the Dublin theatre scene one of the most dazzling in the world.
The Abbey.
Out of the strivings for independence grew Ireland's National Theatre.
The Abbey is a shrine to the Irish flair for words, for the tragicomic.
Much of the credit for the Abbey's founding goes to the remarkable Lady Augusta Gregory.
She shared the theatre's directorship, and she herself wrote some forty plays.
Downstairs, the Abbey feeds a sibling, the Peacock Theatre.
The Peacock delves into plays in Gaelic and the experimental.
So we turned into barony carence, and there sure enough, up in the corner, was the citizen,
having a great confab with himself, and that bloody mangy mongrel, Gary Owen.
Still, to many Dubliners, south of the Liffey is where the action is.
Dublin's smartest shops are on Grafton Street.
Grafton ends at St. Stephen's Green, the city's landmark park.
Twenty-two acres of trees, ponds, fountains, and flowers.
Until 1663, this was an open common.
This is the green heart of James Joyce's Dublin.
Crossing Stephen's, that is my green.
Not since Shakespeare, as a writer, used the English language with such originality as
Dublin's most famous son, James Joyce.
James, Augustine, Aloysius Joyce, was born at number fourteen Brighton Square in Rathkep,
south suburban Dublin.
His father was a rates collector.
This is Sandy Cove, on Dublin Bay.
Sandy Cove is still a place where Spartan gentlemen bathe in the rough, cold sea.
In 1904, Joyce had lived there, in this squat stone tower.
Today, it's the James Joyce Museum, housing the writer's furniture and mementos.
Piano, neckties, guitar.
When he was about thirty years old, Joyce courted a young woman named Nora Barnacle.
Nora returned Joyce's romantic interest.
They went off together to the European continent as self-style exiles.
In time, Joyce and Nora married.
Joyce spent much of his time writing books.
The going was tough.
But Nora stuck with him, even though she wasn't sure what his books were all about.
By the time he died in 1941, this sparse, nearsighted man had become a colossus of twentieth
century literature.
James Joyce had not been back to his hometown in over thirty years.
Yet, in all of his works, he had written of nothing but Dublin.
To him, Dublin was the dead center of the universe.
In the tremendous vitality of his prose, Dublin is the stage upon which the human tragicomedy
is acted out.
Yes.
Lived.
Then I ask with my eyes to ask again, yes.
Then he asked me, would I yes, to say yes.
And his heart was going like mad.
And yes, I said yes.
I will.
Yes.
We sometimes forget that English is not the native language of the Irish people.
It was forced on them.
In adopting it, they created an Irish English.
A rich froth of wit and whimsy tops the conversational flow.
The ancestors of these people were bards, poets, storytellers.
Today a storyteller in a pub strikes the same note.
As the evening poisons with a blackbird on its table of head.
Just that.
And here and there, a gate.
There are 10,500 of these pubs in the country.
One for every 350 citizens.
And there's always a grand welcome.
Here the gab is as heady as the Guinness.
The pub crowd becomes family.
And the pub itself, a celebration of Ireland.
But dear Ireland is more than the bravado of her talk.
Or a love for dogs.
And horses.
More than her haunting history.
Her wild seas.
The emerald facets of her landscapes.
More than her countryside so unspoiled.
So frankly rural.
More than that secret scripture of the poor.
The Irish language.
It is Ireland's fundamental peopleness.
The wonder of simply being a person.
That so many of us have lost still lingers here.
And oh, the dreaming.
The dreaming.
Each late summer night of the annual Edinburgh Festival
is marked by a military tattoo.
It's breathtaking.
Masked regiments advancing through the gatehouse of the city's brooding castle.
The drums flourishing.
And the scurl of the pipes.
Yet some of these tartan stalwarts hail from lands oceans away from the highlands and lowlands
of Bondscotland.
From Canada.
From Australia.
Among the thousands of spectators are visitors from Australia and New Zealand.
Nations plumped with Scottish blood.
And from Canada and the US their phone directories patterned on Scottish names.
And there are spectators here from places where Scottish immigrants have rarely set
foot.
It sometimes seems that everyone wants a swatch of tartan.
And so come the visitors.
Not only for the stupendous Edinburgh Festival, but for the everyday, every season festival
of Scotland itself.
One of the last great wilderness areas of Europe, Scotland is the northernmost reach
of the British Isles.
With a population of over five million, its land area is a bit larger than that of the
Canadian province of New Brunswick.
And about the size of the American state of Maine.
Its southernmost point lies a thousand miles north of the latitudes of New York.
Yet the residual warmth of the Gulf Stream awash Scotland's west coast induce palms
to grow and semi-tropical gardens to flourish.
Touring Scotland will take you to the borders where loom the splendid abbeys built by King
David I.
Moody testaments to Scotland's bloodied history.
The lilting landscapes of Dumfries and Eyre, stamping grounds of that most famous of Scottish
poets, Robert Burns.
The metropolis of Glasgow, which with invincible spirit transformed itself from an industrial
monster to the Cinderella city of the British Isles.
Ringed by woods and mountains, the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond.
The all-season grandeur of the Western Highlands.
And the haunting Vale of Glencoe, where the McDonald's were treacherously murdered.
Culloden's Bleak Moor, site of the last great battle fought on British soil.
Island hopping in the Hebrides.
Enchanted Iona.
Over the Sea to Skye.
And Lewis and Harris.
And Varness, sometimes called the capital of the Highlands.
And Loch Ness, where according to those who claimed to have seen it over the past 1400
years, there lurks a huge monster called Nessie.
The wind-battered Orkneys and Shetlands.
The glistening granite city of Aberdeen.
Glom's Castle, where tradition sets the murder of King Duncan by Macbeth.
Scotland, being mother and nurse of the game called golf, golfers galore come from everywhere
to play the course at St. Andrews, which is 800 years old.
The Firth of Forth.
And all Scotland's capital, Highlands and Lowe.
The festival city of Edinburgh.
This is the Scotland of the Ballad and the Bonne Brède.
Of the Weed Ram and the Dry Whip.
Of the Verse, the Ditty and the Song.
The Glory and the Grandeur.
Human beings hugging these rugged coasts, hunted and fished here some 6000 years ago.
We don't know who they were.
We have no name for them.
About 2000 years ago, tribes that were Scotland's first historical inhabitants banded together,
loosely forming a nation.
The Romans, who at the time occupied what is now England, called these tribesmen the
Picts, meaning painted men, because the Picts painted themselves blue.
Give those savages to their spiky mountains and bottomless lakes.
Was the Romans' attitude?
Being consummate engineers, they constructed colossal fortified walls.
Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine, shutting out the wild men of the north.
The walls still stand.
Today, they're barely sufficient to keep out a stray collie.
But they've become a stony symbol of the unscalable barrier separating the Scots from the English.
After the Roman legions left Britannia, the Britons invaded, and the Angles, that was
in the 5th century.
And from Ireland, the Gaelic-speaking Scots, who gave the country its name.
Then a final element was introduced into the population, the Norse.
In the 9th century, Vikings came to plunder, but stayed to settle.
Scotland became a mismatch of cantankerous lowlands and unconquerable highlands, a great
brawl of feuding families and petty kingdoms.
But under King Kenneth MacAlphin, a united Scottish kingdom began taking shape over a
thousand years ago.
And a rabid lion came to symbolize that kingdom.
This is Scone Palace, original site of the Stone of Destiny.
This is the place where Scotland's kings were crowned.
1500 to a thousand years ago, this was one of three capitals of the Scots kingdom of
Dalriada.
This rock-hewn footprint and this font were sacred objects in the ancient rituals of kingship.
For centuries, the English, who to this day the Scots call Sassanacs, encroached on Scottish
soil and Scottish rights.
Scotland bred its defenders, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, whose 6,000 fighting
Scots whipped an English force of 20,000 here at Bannockburn.
Who then are these wild men and women of the North?
Picts, Gaels, Celts, and Norsemen.
Today they're all Scots.
Scottish, never Scotch.
Scotch is the whiskey most imbibed throughout the world.
Scotch describes a buttery shortbread and a game in which children hop, but never the
nationality of Scotland's people.
From this land breathtaking to behold, but topped by poor soil, comes a people of confounding
contradictions.
Frugal, but at times generous to a fall.
Excessively practical, yet romantic.
Hard-nosed, yet sentimental.
Doer, yet endowed with a wry sense of humor.
Despite centuries of an austere Kirk that molded the Scots' sturdy character, Calvin
Oatcakes and Sulphur, there's an often unresisting temptation to put faith into banshees and
haunting spirits.
Indeed, touring this land, a traveler is tempted to believe in spooks himself.
Scotland holds only 10% of the population of the United Kingdom, yet outstanding Scots
who grace a who's who in Britain far exceed that percentage.
Philosopher David Hume, James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, and opera diva Mary Garden,
and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer
of penicillin, and on and on.
The impact the Scots have made throughout the whole world is even more remarkable.
From Nova Scotia, New Scotland, to British Columbia, Scots provided a large share of
both the brains and brawn that built Canada.
Alexander Mackenzie was born in Scotland, as was Alexander Graham Bell.
13 of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence bore Scottish names.
The father of Alexander Hamilton was born in Scotland.
So was the father of the United States Navy, John Paul Jones.
And Andrew Carnegie, he was born here, in Dumfermline.
Today there is being peddled a pre-packaged stereotype of a Scotsman.
Clan shops retail tartans by the yard.
The roots of a visitor's family tree can be grafted onto those of a noble Highland Laird,
probably named John.
It is as foolhardy to encapsulate Scotland as kilts, haggis, and whiskey, as it would
be for a Scot to regard America as no more than Levi's, hot dogs, and martinis.
As with folk everywhere, Scots are best seen in their mother landscape.
Scotland is land, bends, crags, braids, glens.
Scotland is water, burns, rivers, firs, and lochs.
Scotland is places, from castles to crofts, from its Athens of the north to its far-flung
North Sea islands.
Being called the Borders should in no way imply that this region is only of borderline
interest.
Just follow the riverbanks to Kelso, Melrose, Dryborough, and Jedborough, towns flanking
the ancient Roman wall which thrust north from England.
In the 12th century, under the great Scottish King David I, these towns saw a frenzy of
church building.
Four splendid abbeys arose, sealing the towns royal pedigrees.
Kings were crowned here.
But the Borders had always been a battlefield between the Scots and the Sassanacs.
Ties of armed clashes turned them into ruins.
Now they stand as testaments to a bloody history.
To wild cheering from the townsfolk, young horsemen spur their mounts southward.
Each year from towns such as Peebles and Selkirk and Galashiels, the border lads gallop to
the welcome to Scotland signs and proclaim in clarion voices the abiding freedoms of
the Scots to the English South.
These are called the Common Riding.
At the center of the Borders, overlooking the River Tweed, stands Abbots Ford House,
home of one of the most widely read writers of the 19th century, Sir Walter Scott.
I'm Jean Maxwell Scott and I'm a great, great, great granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott, whose
portrait by Sir Henry Rayburn you see here.
It's a shrine to visitors weaned on Scots Rob Roy and Ivanhoe.
Gretna Green and there's a wedding in progress.
Traditionally, Scottish blacksmiths were empowered to perform weddings and why not, since a smith
had the power to wed two medals to each other, making them one.
Some centuries ago, Scotland was the place that English couples eloped to from the other
side of the Borders.
In accordance with ancient Scottish law, very gladly pronounce you to be husband and wife.
Dumfries and Galloway of the southern uplands, a region of hills and mountains and coastal
plains.
This is Robert Byrne's country.
Set by the waters of the Irish Sea, Collane Castle is the showplace of Ayrshire.
A medieval stronghold, magnificently redesigned by Robert Adam and built in the late 1700s,
it crowns a country park of 560 acres.
Its owner today is the National Trust of Scotland, which restores and maintains over a hundred
such historic properties.
Inevitably, Collane summons memories of Dwight D. Eisenhower as the supreme commander of
allied forces in World War II.
In 1945, a grateful Scottish nation presented Eisenhower with a spacious apartment in the
castle for his use for the rest of his life.
Ike, as he was called, and his family came here frequently to get away from it all.
Ike liked to golf, and the Ayrshire coast harbors a golfer's dream resort, Turnberry.
This windswept site was the setting for the 1986 British Open duel between Jack Nicklaus
and Tom Watson.
The British Open is often played here.
There are two courses at Turnberry, and of all the great Scottish links, the Aylsa course
is the most dramatic.
During two World Wars, a course had been levelled for use as an airfield, and then faithfully
restored.
A gentle giant.
That's the native Scottish Clydesdale, 17 hands high and weighing close to a ton.
Originally, Clydesdales were bred for hard work.
Today, they're trained for a more genteel life.
Clydesdales have style.
Mill farms grace the southeastern landscape.
As sacred as this soil is to the Scots, its yields in produce are sometimes small.
So the farmers here have always looked to livestock as a prime source of income.
A Heeland Coo, a specimen of that shaggy native breed of Highland cattle, so at home on heaps
and moors.
Greatest yield of the Scottish farms is the ploughman poet Robert Burns.
Burns wrote in broad Scots dialect for plain people.
For man's a man for all that.
A lusty fellow, he wrote of his love of women.
Oh, my love is like a red, red rose.
And of his loathing of pretense and hypocrisy.
A fig for those by law protected.
Liberty is a glorious feast.
Because he was their champion, he is the poet of earthy men and women the world over.
His portraits appeared even on a postage stamp in Romania.
The family Bible holds a record of his birth in 1759 in this cottage to a farming family
in Allouez.
The first seven years of his life were spent in these rooms.
This is a manuscript of Holy Willy's Prayer signed in Burns' own hand.
At this cottage in Dumfries, the poet died of a rheumatic heart at age 37 and was buried
with honors in St. Michael's Churchyard.
Near the old Brigadon, ridge over the River Dune, stands a monument honoring him.
In our day, people everywhere are quoting Robert Burns when they sing,
We'll take a cup of kindness yet for old Langsine.
Everglide is the prime waterway to the heart of Scotland and Glasgow is the country's
biggest city, third largest in the British Isles.
But from Glasgow, it's only a short excursion to Loch Lomond.
There's a saying in Scotland, though Edinburgh is the capital, Glasgow is where the capital
is.
From the Industrial Revolution through the grim years after World War II, Glasgow was
an urban nightmare.
A smoke-choke city with the toughest neighborhoods and Britain's worst slums.
And warrens of children, their little faces painted with soot and grime.
Fueled by some sound planning and the dry irreverent wit that Glaswegians are known
for, the city underwent a spectacular transformation.
Today Glasgow is the Cinderella City of Britain.
Glasgow has been university town for the past 500 years, but today, Glaswegians are calling
it Culture City.
Ship owners Sir William Burrell willed his fabulous collection, which includes priceless
stained glass and Chinese ceramics, to the city.
Now it's housed in a stunningly modern museum building in Glasgow's Greenbelt.
It's the big summertime holiday here.
The Glasgow Fair has been celebrated ever since 1190.
Today's urchins, who've never had to scrub off the soot and grime that smudged their
grandparents, submit to face painting with the Cinderella colors of the city.
A beautiful wooded valley between two lakes, the Trussics, robbers' roost for the heroic
outlaw Rob Roy, who was glorified in a novel by Sir Walter Scott.
It's a short trip from Glasgow.
The Trussics are best viewed from a passenger steamer that plies the waters of Lough Catrine.
The ship is well named, the Sir Walter Scott, and it's Lough Catrine that's the setting
for Scott's Lady of the Lake.
Even closer to Glasgow is Lough Lomond, dubbed the Queen of the Loughs.
She's set majestically in the realm of forest and mountains.
Of all the lakes in Caledonia, Lough Lomond is the most celebrated in song.
Travelers yearning to traverse the wilds of Scotland while ensconced in the lap of luxury
can board the Royal Scotsman.
It's the most luxurious train in the world, crisscrossing Scotland under steam hall.
The six-day tour it offers is a luxury travel experience.
28 guests, yes pampered guests, not passengers, reside on board.
On the British Isles, rolling stock is called a railway carriage, not a railroad car.
Well these indeed are carriages, vintage carriages, restored to their Victorian and Edwardian
glories.
The dining carriage is the oldest in the world, still in service.
It was built in 1891.
Chefs are masters.
Service impeccable.
But the outstanding attraction viewed from these posh interiors is Scotland itself.
Thrusting in all seasons into the Western Highlands, the lovely harbour town of Oban,
brooding Glencoe, Glenfinnan on Loch Sheel, and tragic Caledon Moor.
Each season in Scotland has its own special sights and sounds, its own appeal.
Steam trains of the Western Railway departing year round from Glasgow make it possible to
explore the Highlands comfortably in any weather.
They're never far from the water.
The train stops at towns and hamlets, even junction, somewhere the station master doubles
as postmaster.
Trainings run every weekday, but never on the Sabbath.
Oban's busy harbour is the finest on the Highland seaboard.
It was the railway that made the town of Oban, along with the advent of steamboats.
From the rugged Argyle coastline, arriving at this narrow valley, Glencoe.
Here the traveller speaks in whispers.
In a winter's dawn in 1692, government soldiers of the Argyle regiment, who had accepted the
hospitality of the McDonald clan here, brutally slaughtered every McDonald under 70.
Men, women, and bears.
It is called the Glen of Weeping.
It seems that the pain of this event still rides in this brooding valley.
Some 15 miles to the north is Fort William, a main base for climbers determined to scale
Ben Nevis, Scotland's own Big Ben, at 4,406 feet, the highest mountain in the British
Isles.
With winter's blasts, herds of stag migrate to the lower reaches in their search for food.
Maleg is a takeoff point for a region drenched in Scottish history, its glories and its tragedies.
In 1707, a union was forged between Scotland and England.
England's Cross of St. George was superimposed over Scotland's Cross of St. Andrew, forming
with the old flag of Ireland, the Union Jack.
To many of the Highland clans, this union was a shotgun wedding.
There were years of quashed efforts to re-seat a Scottish steward on the throne of this United
Kingdom, a throne in Westminster Abbey now held by the House of Hanover.
Good-looking and tragically reckless, Charles Edward Stuart had been born in Rome.
Since boyhood, he'd been called Bonnie Prince Charlie.
He grew up driven by a single steely aim in life, to regain the throne for the House of
Stuart.
To that end, he sailed to Scotland and rallied the clans to his cause at Glenfinnan on the
shores of Loch Sheel.
It sparked the glorious Rebellion of 1745.
The showdown came at Dramosy Moor in Culloden, where Prince Charlie's Highlanders were cut
to pieces by the Duke of Cumberland's artillery.
For the clans, Culloden marked the end of the Highland way of life.
But Charlie escaped and lived for 42 years after Culloden.
He died a broken man.
The legend of Bonnie Prince Charlie looms larger in Scottish national consciousness
than the man who bore that name.
He's idealized in sweet pain.
His sovereignty never attained.
The fight well fought, but unwon.
Stretching along the rugged west coast is a chain of fabled islands, the Hebrides.
In fact, there are two groups of islands, the Inner Hebrides and the Outer Hebrides,
often called the Western Isles.
Mull, beautiful Mull, is one of the inner isles.
Mull sometimes serves as a jumping off place for the most sacred of the Scottish Isles,
Iona.
To some, just setting foot here is the beginning of a pilgrimage.
It was to Iona that St. Columba sailed from Ireland some 1400 years ago.
The abbey that he founded became one of the most influential in Europe.
48 Scottish, 4 Irish and 8 Norwegian kings, as well as numerous clan chiefs, are buried
in Iona's holy soil, which it is believed expurgates all sins.
Six miles north of Iona is Tiny Staffa, an uninhabited island of bizarre rock formations.
This black maw is the gaping mouth of a cave named after Fingal, a Celtic hero.
Its echoes of the crashing sea inspired Felix Mendelssohn to compose one of his best known
overtures, Fingal's Cave.
Over the sea to sky, a big island sky, 50 miles long, shrouded in clouds of Celtic mist,
it's a place of many moods and colors.
So irregular is this island's coast that no place is more than a few minutes from the
sea.
About 12,000 people live on this island.
In times past, the main occupation was crofting, that is, small farming on this rocky soil.
You can visit an old croft as it was then, sparse furnishings and plain.
An open Bible printed in the Gaelic language.
More than half of the island's people speak Gaelic as their everyday language, and one
of the prides of sky is its Gaelic college.
Of the Otter Hebrides, Lewis holds stretches of stark moorlands, a few peat bog groves,
and fewer trees.
Crofting and fishing provide livelihoods.
The people here were fiercely loyal to Bonnie Prince Charlie.
This island loomed large in the lives of some prehistoric people, for here stands a circle
of ritual stones, something like Stonehenge.
No one's certain why they're here.
The southerly isle is Herith.
Her name is found in most every wardrobe where British woolens are prized, Harris, Harris
Tweed.
It's a cottage industry here, a traditionally hand-woven tweed of water-shedding wool.
Though with today's innovative pedals to work a loom, it could be called foot-woven.
This venerable lady is a last holdout.
She's weaving the way the old folks did, doubly guaranteeing the qualities that have earned
Harris its worldwide reputation.
Her homeland, her Scotland, is much like her tweed, coarse at times, in a homespun kind
of way, but warm and comfortable when worn close to the heart.
Most Scottish woolens are less quaintly produced.
There's a world market for them, and supply could never meet the demand if it were otherwise.
Scotland is one vast grazing ground for sheep.
Even in large cities, it's often sheep that keep the turf trim on the golf courses.
And in the countryside, a visitor counts many more sheep than people.
There's evidence of them everywhere, snag, wool, wherever you look.
They even devour the morning paper.
Overworked shepherds look to their dogs for help.
Between the dogs and a complex language of whistles, flocks are moved from one pasture
to another.
Because of its wet, raw climate, Scottish sheep grow protective coats of remarkable
depth and quality.
Fleecing is a springtime ritual.
Maybe it's the whirring of the power shears, or the soothing hands of the shearers.
But shearing mesmerizes the sheep.
Inverness, the River Ness, and Loch Ness, home of the controversial monster.
These are the northern highlands, stretching as far north as the road goes.
John O'Groats.
A chief town of the highlands is Inverness, which claims the title, the Highlands Natural
Capital.
Macbeth had a castle here once, from which he ruled for 17 years.
Inverness holds its Highland Gathering in July.
But these gatherings are in vogue all over Scotland, about 100 in all, held sometime
between May and mid-September.
Gathering events, or games, are traditional, and often referred to as the Oatmeal Olympics.
Originally, the games were used for selecting bodyguards for a Highland Chief, or for a
King.
In times past, they awarded Baldricks, Warrior's Belts, as trophies.
Today it's Silver Cup.
It's girls, rarely over 18, and often as young as three or four, who compete in the dance
events.
Coursing through an area of Inverness is the Caledonian Canal, a waterway from the Atlantic
Ocean to the North Sea, and a triumph of early 19th century engineering.
During summer, it's plied by pleasure boats.
Of the natural lakes that make up much of that waterway, Loch Ness is notorious, not
for the ruins of the 12th century castle Urquhart, projecting into the loch on a tongue of land.
But because of the monster, whose home is this cold, incredibly deep, biggest body of
freshwater in Britain.
Early chronicles say that St. Columba sighted the monster in the 6th century, and there
have been many more sightings in the past 1,400 years.
Some have been sworn to by people unlikely to fib just for the publicity.
First photo ever made of what is claimed to be the monster was taken in 1933 by a vacationing
surgeon.
Now, everyone's trying to get a shot of Nessie, as the monsters come to be called, with no
little affection, from a TV crew from Japan to an American one-man submarine.
Here's a photo made in 1972, with Nessie looking rather lumpy.
Whether Nessie originates from the bottom of the loch or from the bottom of a bottle,
let the visitor take heed.
This monster may be a bafflement to scientists, but it's a bonanza to the local merchants.
So dear visitors, confine your doubts to whispers until you're shouting distance from Loch Ness.
River Spey flows to the Moray Coast, which stretches eastward from Inverness.
In fishing villages named with knockabout syllables, Rosehearty, Portnocky, and Banff,
the family wash is drying on the clothesline.
So is the family meal.
Were you to order whiskey anywhere in the world except Ireland, Canada, and the US,
you'd be served Scotch whiskey.
Perhaps that accounts for the popularity of the Whiskey Trail tours with some visitors.
Though it's been tried, and with great expense, Scotch whiskey cannot be made outside of Scotland.
The old histories claim that missionary monks were its first distillers.
In 1494, it was chronicled as the Water of Life.
Indeed, the soft water of the highlands is a vital ingredient.
For a Scotch to be sold legally, it must have been cast for at least three years.
While maturing in the casts, whiskey evaporates quite a bit.
Really then, all a visitor needs to do is breathe in.
The road north ends at Caithness, where a Dutchman named Jan de Groot once ran a ferry
from the mainland to Orkney.
His fine Dutch name became John O'Groats to the Scots, designating the most northerly
point in Britain, 874 miles from Land's End in the extreme south of England.
The archipelago of 67 islands called Orkney, meaning seal islands in the Old Norse, and
the 100 or so remote islands called Shetland, of which a dozen are inhabited, are the northernmost
outposts of the British Isles.
Travelers today don't always bother with the ferry for island hopping in Orkney.
There's a scheduled airline that operates between Westry and Papa Westry, carrying school
kids, pets, and the mail.
It's the world's shortest commercial flight, one minute, 45 seconds.
The Ring of Brodgar, this circle of mute stones, is a monument of a nameless people who dwelt
here some 6,000 years ago.
Scarab Ray isn't quite so old.
In 1850, a storm had uncovered a few telltale stones.
This triggered an excavation.
Finally it emerged, a Neolithic settlement 5,000 years old.
Dwellings, passageways, even underground sewers.
They've called Scarab Ray the Pompeii of Britain.
Kirkwall began as a Viking trading post and grew to become a center of Nordic Christianity.
Now it's the Orkney capital.
These islands belonged to Norway until the end of the 15th century.
And until the end of the 1800s, Norwegian was the language spoken here.
This old fishing port, Stromnes, was the final port of call for ships of the Hudson Bay Company.
During World War II, after a German submarine penetrated the Scapa Flow and sank a British
battleship, Italian prisoners of war were made to build these barriers, called the Churchill
Barriers, to seal off the flow.
But these barriers weren't the only thing those Italians were building.
On lamb home, out of scrap metal and other bits and pieces they could scrounge, those
homesick Italian POWs built this lovely chapel.
One hundred forty-eight miles northeast of Orkney lies Shetland, consisting of a hundred
sea-worn islands.
Hills clad in broom and heather and countless birds nesting in the cliffs.
Though birds are in abundance, people are scarce.
The 2300 Shetlanders regard themselves as Norse rather than Scottish or British.
Indeed, the nearest mainland settlement is Bergen, Norway.
They're outnumbered eight to one, these Shetlanders, by sheep.
Shetland has given its name to a respected breed of sheepdog, the Shelty, as well as
to a shaggy pint-sized horse, the Shetland Pony.
Thousands of people sat in a saddle for the first time at a Shetland pony ride in a park.
Aberdeen and Dundee, the two major cities of eastern Scotland, are only seventy miles
apart.
In the backyards between them, there's a lifetime of vistas.
Then a short jaunt to Fife, the holy land of golf.
Who has not heard of the granite city Aberdeen?
Granite in the glistening stone the city's built of, such as Marischal College, where
the sparkling stone has been made to resemble lace.
Granite in the flinty character of its people.
Aberdeen exudes self-assurance and prosperity.
It's the capital of Scotland's fishing industry.
At the crack of dawn, fish brokers, wholesalers, buyers and merchants, all charged with a new
day's energy, are bartering in a language understood only by those in the trade.
They're a shrewd lot, but then so are the gulls.
The same early morning might find a chopper taking off from Aberdeen, the city which had
easily assumed the role of the oil capital of Europe.
Destination?
North Sea Platform 703.
Platform 703 is a drilling rig.
Two hundred lives are at stake here.
Back when, it was assumed that the impact of the North Sea oil discovery would cure
all of Scotland's economic ills.
It hasn't.
In the meantime, some must be content to count their blessings in barrows.
Taking its name from this spine of mountains, Grampian is Scotland's northeastern shoulder.
An unusually high number of royal warrants are displayed by the tradesmen of this village.
That means that they're supplying goods or services to the royal family.
It's no wonder.
Balmoral Castle is nearby.
When Queen Victoria beheld this area, she exclaimed,
This dear paradise.
So her devoted husband and consort, Prince Albert, built her this storybook castle in
the Scottish Boronial style.
Balmoral.
But it's the 13th century Blair Castle that smacks genuinely of feudal Scotland.
This whited stronghold is the home of the Duke of Athel, the only citizen in Britain
with the right to maintain a private army, the Athel Highlanders.
Tayside gushes with cataracts and rushing streams, chilling the boots of fly-fishing
sportsmen before emptying into Lachtey, which has the source of River Tay at its foot.
In long meat rows in the Tayside valleys, raspberries are grown for the jam factories
of Dundee.
Dundee is Tayside's big town, known for its jams and marmalade.
But there's more to Dundee than preserves.
There's preservation.
Victoria Dock harbors the RRS Discovery, which carried Captain Robert Scott's 1901 expedition
to the Antarctic.
Freshwater pearls from River Tay have been treasured for centuries.
They grace the crown jewels of Scotland, of England.
They've been recovered from the ruins of ancient Rome.
This Tayside pearl fisher searches patiently for his pearl of great price.
The equipment is all you need is a fork stick and a glass button bucket and a sack to put
the shells in and a good pair of waders.
That's your equipment.
That's your technology.
Now here's a shell here that it's twisted.
There's a pearl in this one you know before you open it.
There you are.
There's a good pearl in this one.
Lift it with your fingers and put it in your mouth and put it under your tongue.
That's the safest place to keep them.
Glom's Castle, with its crenellated battlements, dates mainly to the 17th century.
But there was a castle here a thousand years before that.
Shakespeare had made this site the setting for Macbeth.
Full hail Thane of Glom's!
Home to the earls of Strathmore, it's as close to a fairy tale castle as any in Scotland.
It was at Glom's that Princess Margaret was born.
Her mother, now the Queen Mother, was Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyne of the House of Strathmore.
The man she'd marry was the Duke of York, who, because of his older brother's abdication,
would become King George VI.
But they were a giant step from the throne when this snapshot was taken.
She had no notion then that her firstborn Elizabeth would one day be Queen.
This is the present Lady Strathmore, seated in the wing reserved for the Queen Mother's
visits.
Hello.
I'm Mary, Countess of Strathmore, and I would like to welcome you very warmly indeed to
Glom's Castle.
Glom's is steeped in history and has very many beautiful rooms, but I am now sitting
in one of my very favorite rooms, which is known as the Queen Mother's sitting room.
There's a sort of castle, a Scottish palace in the Glens, where everyone is treated like
royalty.
The Glen Eagles Hotel stands tall in the Perthshire landscape.
An all-round sports resort, its moorland courses are regarded as a golfer's dream.
The hotel itself offers the kind of pampering that a true sportsman shouldn't need, but
likes.
This is a Scottish breakfast.
Bought separately, it works out to about five pounds, and that's just the weight gain.
Fife just jauntily into the North Sea, its coastline notched with picturesque harbors
ending at the fishing village of Crail.
Crail's becomes something of a holiday resort.
But Fife's history centers in St. Andrew's, once a cathedral town and the seat of Scotland's
oldest university.
Today St. Andrew's is a shrine, not for its religious significance, but for the cult of
the green turf.
Its golfers are drawn to St. Andrew's like pilgrims.
Here the old course, laid out in the 15th century, holds the highest place among the courses
of the world.
The royal and ancient golf club formed in 1754 is the world's guardian of the rules
of the game.
St. Andrew's course is a lynx, a sandy undulating piece of land bordering the seashore.
It's the quintessential Scottish course.
Passing from Fife through the Firth of Forth, we've roughly circled back to our starting
point, the festival city of Edinburgh.
Firth is a word the Scots used for a long, narrow inlet from the sea, and here is where
the sea meets the River Forth.
Two great bridges span the Firth of Forth.
The railway bridge, begun in 1883, is a marvel of 19th century engineering.
The road bridge was opened in 1964.
This is a gateway to Edinburgh.
Drifting with a morning mist to where it all started, majestic Edinburgh, the true capital
of Scotland in the heart of every Scotsman.
It's been almost 1400 years since the first settlers arrived on this volcanic ridge, where
through distant centuries, a fortified town arose stretching from Castle Rock to the Palace
of Hollywood House.
That was the thimble size of Edinburgh when a striking young widow arrived here some 400
years ago.
Mary Stuart, Queen of the Scots, almost six feet tall and every inch of her a queen.
Mary was brought into the world on a wintery day in 1542, here at the palace at Linlithgow.
Her royal father, King James V, lay dying here in Falkland Palace, praying for a son.
When he learned that it was not a boy, six days later he died.
Mary was hardly a year old when at Stirling Castle she was crowned queen.
She grew up romping in this garden.
Yours was a joyful disposition, she loved dancing, hunting, playing golf.
Yes, Mary of Scotland had a sense of fun.
When she was 15 she was married in Paris to the Dauphin of France, who was a year younger.
They grew fond of each other.
And when her young husband died two years later, Mary wrote,
By day, by night, I think of him, My heart keeps watch for one who's gone.
Returning to Scotland, she began her reign honestly and fearlessly.
Her tolerance was unique among the rulers of her time.
A Catholic herself, Mary dealt fairly and without bigotry towards subjects of different
religions.
A royal steward, Lord Darnley, became her second husband.
And Mary reigned from Holyrood through six years of affronts to her power.
She had been pregnant for six months when in this room, in front of her eyes, her secretary,
David Rizzio, was murdered in cold blood.
So that the shock would kill both queen and heir in premature childbirth is what many
believed.
If that was true, the plot failed.
In this chamber in Edinburgh Castle, Mary did give birth to a son.
The child lived, so did the mother.
He was Chrisan James.
Now Lord Darnley, her child's weak, conniving father, was strangled by those conspiring
against her.
Mary found herself a woman alone in a lair of power-hungry nobles.
Despite her marriage to the Earl of Bothwell at their urging, her nobles imprisoned her
in Loch Lavin Castle, where she was pressured into signing away her crown in favor of her
infant son.
But the dauntless queen engineered an escape from Loch Lavin and embarked for England to
plead with her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, for help.
On 16 May of 1568, she sailed from this shore for England.
Elizabeth never met her, queen to queen.
Rather, she imprisoned Mary for the next 19 years and then had her condemned to death
for conspiring against her person.
I have not procured nor encouraged any hurt against her majesty, Queen Elizabeth.
When Elizabeth signed Mary's death warrant, she was already 53 years old, an increasingly
homely woman under her flaming red wigs, and she was barren.
Mary of Scotland had always loved animals, particularly dogs.
When she marched so bravely, so calmly to the block, her pet terrier was seen peering
from under the skirts of her gown.
She stretched herself at length, laid her neck on the block, commending herself to God.
It took the axeman three horrid strokes.
One of Mary of Scotland's mottos was prophetic.
Then my end is my beginning.
Elizabeth died childless.
It was Mary's son, James VI of Scotland, who succeeded to the English throne as James I
of England, the first of the House of Stuart, whose bloodline infuses Britain's royal family
of today.
It's here at Holyrood that that direct descendant of Mary's resides when she's in Edinburgh,
the sovereign of the United Kingdom.
Her Majesty enters the forecourt of Holyrood to receive the key to Edinburgh from the Lord
Provost.
Mary, Queen of Scots, had hoped earnestly that Scotland and England might be ruled from
the same throne.
Today that hope is realized in Queen Elizabeth, the first Queen Elizabeth of Scotland, the
second of England.
Her roots draw deeply from the Scottish past.
This Queen belongs to Scotland every bit as much as she belongs to England.
The spine of the ancient city, running from Holyrood House to Edinburgh Castle, is a stretch
of road that packs the scope of Scottish history into one royal mile.
Two hundred years ago, a bet was made by a pair of old Edinburgh golfers.
Who would be the first to drive a ball over the crown steeple of St Giles, the mother
church of the Church of Scotland?
Perhaps the ball struck the nearby statue of John Knox, Scotland's religious reformer,
who'd cast a jaundiced eye on golf.
At the west end of the royal mile, the towers and turrets of Edinburgh Castle perched on
an outcrop of volcanic rock.
A hallowed stronghold that throughout the centuries grew to become a sprawling complex
of batteries and barracks, palaces and prisons.
It is still a working castle and headquarters for the Scottish division of Her Majesty's
Army.
If there is a national shrine in Scotland, it is this castle.
Within its walls are housed the Scottish crown jewels.
There are elements in the golden crown that date to 1306.
The sword and scepter were gifts from Roman popes to Mary, Queen of Scots' grandfather.
This is the oldest royal regalia in Europe.
The lake that once lapped at Castle Rock had been drained, providing a fertile soil bed
for Prince's Street Gardens, the most spacious and elegant park in Scotland.
Bordering the gardens is Prince's Street itself, a splendid mile-long boulevard for shopping
and promenading.
Backed by this spiky monument to Sir Walter Scott, nicknamed the Gothic Rocket.
Old Edinburgh had been a walled-in city, so it had to build up like a medieval Manhattan.
The expanding city had to escape its walls.
So the city stretched over the valley, and in a green field, the building of Newtown
began.
Backed between 1766 and 1840, Newtown is a model of urban planning, shaded squares and
elegant streets and crescents lined by splendid Georgian houses.
Alexander Graham Bell was born at Charlotte Place, and Robert Louis Stevenson lived at
Harriet Road.
The outburst of creativity that built Newtown launched the Scottish Enlightenment.
The arts flourished, and the sciences.
Edinburgh glowed in its international reputation as the Athens of the North.
Such far-flung fame was earned by Edinburgh's medical schools, that the plots of medicinal
herbs cultivated with study grew to become the city's vast botanical gardens.
Indeed, the city's renown for the giants of medicine it has produced.
Another botanically-related medical breakthrough was Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin.
And over here, one November evening in 1847, a young Edinburgh professor caused his guests
to fall unconscious under the dining room table there, because this was the home of
James Simpson, the pioneer of chloroform and the deep sleep of anesthesia.
This is proud Edinburgh, of which Robert Louis Stevenson, a native son, wrote,
This profusion of eccentricities, this dream of masonry and living rock is not a drop scene,
but a city in the world of everyday reality.
But like Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this city has a murky alternate personality.
This was particularly evident in the last century.
It was then that two seemingly respectable fellows, William Burke and William Hare, stalked
the gloomy wines and closes in search of victims, unsuspecting citizens, to strangle.
They then sell their corpses to the medical schools for a pretty penny.
In our waning century, Edinburgh after dark is more frolicsome than fearsome.
There are elegant pubs for a wee dragnet and restaurants glowing with tradition.
And for brave visitors, the rugged national dish, haggis, a mince of entrails, oatmeal
and poetry.
Once initiated to the haggis, visitors are regaled by old Scotland.
Shade and
Each August, the city explodes with the Edinburgh International Festival, the biggest and most
momentous arts festival on earth.
Theatre troops, opera companies, dance ensembles and string quartets cram every auditorium,
church hall and makeshift theatre within reach of the central city.
And when this night tilts into tomorrow, the batteries of floodlights are dimmed out, leaving
a single shaft on a solitary piper on the battlements.
Somehow, heard in the pipes plaintiff's girl is Scotland, its pain and heroism and glory.
Scotland, the Bonnie.
Scotland, the Brave.