If you like your history with a dose of art, have I got a website for you! Writer David Santiuste and photographer Rae Tan have collaborated on a fascinating website combining history and wonderful black and white photographs to illustrate places associated with the Yorkist cause during the Wars of the Roses.
Anyone who has poked around the Britain Express website will quickly realise that one of my abiding passions is the English country church. I love visiting, photographing, reading about, and writing about these wonderful historic buildings. It is always a great thrill when I get to meet others who share my enthusiasm.
If you've ever explored more than a handful of historic parish churches in England, chances are you have run across royal coats of arms. These heraldic symbols, sometimes carved but more often painted, grace churches from the Elizabethan period to the present day. But why does a symbol of secular power appear in so many churches? When did the first royal arms appear, and why?
I think Steve Bulman likes visiting historic churches as much as I do. He also enjoys photography, for he has created Churches of Britain and Ireland, a wonderful resource of photographs of over 24,300 photos of churches across England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Now Steve did not visit all those churches himself - that would be the task of a lifetime, but he has created a marvellous website and encouraged people to send in photos of their own local church.
I'm a sucker for history websites. I can lose myself in them for ages. I ran across a site today focussed on the Elizabethan period in English history. It was a decent website on the surface, but the more I browsed around the more I realised that the content was fluff, pretty much entirely created to get search engine traffic and entice users to click on advertisements. It was a turn-off, to say the least, but it got me wondering if there were any other really good sites out there that cover the Elizabethan period.
When I was poking around a musty old second-hand book store in Calgary, Canada several decades ago, I stumbled across a huge leather-bound book in a glass case, set aside like it was the crown jewels. I asked the bookstore owner for a closer look and as soon as I opened the creaking cover of the book I knew I had to buy it. The book was entitled 'A History of the British Nation', written in 1912 by an Oxford scholar named AD Innes.
David Ross is the editor of BritainExpress.com. By training a historian and photographer, he enjoys nothing more than exploring odd corners of Britain.
Stunning UK prints for sale by award-winning photographer David Ross, editor of Britain Express, the UK Travel and Heritage Guide.
Free entry to National Trust properties throughout England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, plus discounted admission to National Trust for Scotland properties.