To Be a Traveler and Not a Tourist

IT WAS THE ARRIVAL of the Boeing 747 in 1970, the first world’s first commercial wide-body airplane, that rendered transoceanic airfare affordable to the multitudes. In ever greater numbers Americans have crossed the Atlantic to explore our national roots, and often the roots of our own families.
Great Britain is quite simply our most accessible transcontinental destination. After all, the language is not a problem (though our ears often need to make an adjustment). Britain is one country where people actually like Americans, even if they don’t quite understand us. And we do appreciate the contribution that Great Britain has made and continues to make to our own history and culture.
Still, it is too easy to take the path of least resistance when visiting Britannia. Hoards of coaches follow each other along well-beaten tourist routes, from London to Stonehenge to Bath and back, to Oxford, Blenheim Palace, Stratford-upon-Avon to Warwick Castle, and on the wide circuit that pretends you can see the whole island in two weeks. People go to see stately homes and gardens, castles and cathedrals, and all the iconic images that recall Britain to our imagination. Largely what such tourists see, of course, is Britain from a coach window and tiresome miles of motorway.
How much better it is to be a traveler, instead of a tourist—to see less more, rather than more a little bit. Oh, those cathedrals are wonderful enough, Durham and Worcester and Wells, but they are to be savored, not rushed through during a 45-minute lunch stop. Tourists are collecting places to say they’ve been, like notches on the belt.
The travelers want to understand and to relish the places and people in the context of their history. Being a traveler means taking time to visit with the locals, sampling comestibles outside our familiar comfort zone and getting beyond those castles and gardens—to places like Beamish and Gressenhall that tell the story of how people live and lived in the milieu of their place and time.
The wonderful camaraderie of British Heritage readers, of course, is that we aspire to be travelers and not simply tourists. We go to search out where our families came from in the coal fields of South Wales, the Grampian highlands or the terraces of Lancashire mill towns. We go to experience what we cannot experience at home. We go to broaden our knowledge and our understanding of the bigger world beyond our shores. We go see for ourselves why to an American a hundred years is a long time and to a Brit a hundred miles is a long distance. And when we can’t go, or can’t go anywhere near often enough, British Heritage takes us there.