sent from: Esher, Surrey, UK. destination: Canterbury, Kent, UK

Someone said once that the history of the USA is horizontal – Columbus here, Pilgrims there, Spanish and Russians and Mexicans in the South and West, lots of Indians in between and excursions across the planes [sic – plains]. In contrast history in the UK and elsewhere is vertical.
Take Canterbury for instance. Stand in the middle of its cathedral nave and you go from today, through the English Civil War, the Tudors and the Reformation, back to the Norman Invasion, then to the Anglo-Saxon cathedral that stood there. Dig even more and you get to St Augustine, then a grassy ruin, and before that the Roman temple that stood in that space, then a hill where the Britons had a hill-fort, and who knows what before that.
All this without taking one step – just by digging down, down.