Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Rural Cooch Behar"

Based on the demographic data of 2001 census, a total number of 4,612 revenue villages have been identified by the Panchayat and Rural Development Department, Govt. of West Bengal, India as the most backward in the state. Cooch Behar (one of the sub Himalayan district of the said state) also had declared 52 (fifty two) villages as backward in two consecutive phases. Some extra developmental impetus had been given in those villages to facilitate growth and prosperity. The present investigation was undertaken in the backward villages of Cooch Behar District of West Bengal (India) to study the success status of government development programmes running in the villages. A sample of 10% families was taken randomly for the study. Besides analyzing the secondary data obtained from ICDS projects (Integrated Child Development Project) and village Panchayat, an index called Composite Success Index (CSI) was developed for assessing the present status of success of the development programmes undertaken by the government agencies. The study revealed that the success of development programmes were low to medium in most of the villages. It is also revealed that success status is more where backwardness is more i.e. more backward villages achieved more success with respect to implementation of different development programmes.

The present work focuses on studying the effect of socio-economic factors on nutritional status of rural households under the Coochbehar-II block of Coochbehar district in West Bengal. A well-structured interview schedule was prepared to collect information about the socio-economic status and nutritional status of the respondents. As an indicator of Nutritional status, the Body Mass Index (BMI) values of the respondents were studied. In the present study, the Independent-Samples Kruskal-Wallis Test and Independent-Samples Mann-Whitney U Test (non-paramedic test) were employed to study the effect of different socio-economic variables on nutritional status of the respondents. Age of the respondents, educational qualification of the respondents, Family size, and House type of the respondents were found to significantly affect the BMI scores of the respondents. The categories of the significantly contributing variables for nutrition like age, education, and house type show significant associations with the BMI categories using Contingency table and Chi-square test.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to loss of human life and presented an unprecedented challenge to public health and food systems. The study was conducted to assess the factors in terms of livelihood profile determining awareness and adaptation level. Using random sampling procedure, data were collected from 80 farmers from four villages under two blocks of Coochbehar district in 2021. Altogether eleven variables i.e., age, education, information availability, social participation, quality of common facilities services, mean distance of common facility services, economic status, expenditure during pandemic, net landholding, number of migrants in family and duration of migration explain 46.9 per cent of variance in awareness level and six variables i.e., personal cosmopolite sources use, social recognition, annual family income before and during pandemic and expenditure before and during pandemic explain 63.7 per cent variance of adaptation level. Rural people should be encouraged to participate in different extension activities. Findings would serve as a valid reference for researchers and policy makers concerning pandemic issues.

Women empowerment through self- help group constitutes an emerging and rapidly expanding trend towards social and economic development of the nation. Self Help Groups (SHGs) are a cutting-edge and critically important concept to promote women's entrepreneurship, self-employment, and empowerment. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of women Self-Help Groups on women empowerment through income generation, increased communication skills, decision-making ability and awareness, and improved social status. The study was conducted in Coochbehar-I and Coochbehar-II block of Coochbehar district. The present study used multi-stage, purposive and simple random sampling methods. The district was selected purposively and blocks, gram panchayats and respondents were selected randomly. The total number of respondents for the study was one hundred eighty (180) women SHG members. After joining SHG, changes in annual income among the members were in low level and changes in empowerment were in medium level among the members of women SHG after joining the women SHG. The prime reason for joining SHG of the women SHG members in the study area is for promoting their savings.

The potential of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) for agriculture in the form of various knowledge management portals has been harnessed by various agricultural developmental organizations and so on. But still, there is a gap in the rural community's adoption and access to such technology. There are many reasons for this adoption lag, in the case of identifying such focused issues in accessing the ICTs, will be the key to addressing those challenges. In such a resilient backdrop, this article investigates by identifying and prioritising the challenges in accessing ICT tools for sustainable agriculture by agricultural system actors in the northern districts of West Bengal. The present study was conducted in two northern districts of West Bengal viz. Cooch Behar and Alipurduar districts. Two hundred respondents included from these two districts were selected randomly for the present study. The sample includes 60 percent of the farmers and 40 percent of extension personnel including scientists from State Agriculture University, Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Assistant directors of State Department of Agriculture, input dealers and grassroots-level extension professionals working in various farmers, clubs and NGOs. These respondents were interviewed through a structured, pre-tested interview schedule developed to measure the extent of ICTs usage designed with the help of the online Google forms and offline interview schedule. The obtained data were processed with the help of statistical tools like frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation and Rank Based Quotient (RBQ). The constraints identified were, ‘lack of training and practical exposure towards ICTs’ (64.8%), followed by ‘high cost of ICT tools (64.55%), ‘insufficient local language information’ (62%), ‘low network connectivity’ (60.90%), ‘unavailability of different ICT tools’ (60.60%), ‘lack of skill in handling ICTs’ (58.65%), ‘lack of confidence in operating ICTs’ (55.40%), ‘high cost of repairing for ICT devices’ (49.40%), ‘irregular power supply’ (37.95%), and ‘lack of awareness of benefits of ICTs’ (36.40%).

IntroductionMany rural communities bear a disproportionate share of drug-related harms. Innovative harm reduction service models, such as vending machines or kiosks, can expand access to services that reduce drug-related harms. However, few kiosks operate in the USA, and their implementation, impact and cost-effectiveness have not been adequately evaluated in rural settings. This paper describes the Kentucky Outreach Service Kiosk (KyOSK) Study protocol to test the effectiveness, implementation outcomes and cost-effectiveness of a community-tailored, harm reduction kiosk in reducing HIV, hepatitis C and overdose risk in rural Appalachia.Methods and analysisKyOSK is a community-level, controlled quasi-experimental, non-randomised trial. KyOSK involves two cohorts of people who use drugs, one in an intervention county (n=425) and one in a control county (n=325). People who are 18 years or older, are community-dwelling residents in the target counties and have used drugs to get high in the past 6 months are eligible. The trial compares the effectiveness of a fixed-site, staffed syringe service programme (standard of care) with the standard of care supplemented with a kiosk. The kiosk will contain various harm reduction supplies accessible to participants upon valid code entry, allowing dispensing data to be linked to participant survey data. The kiosk will include a call-back feature that allows participants to select needed services and receive linkage-to-care services from a peer recovery coach. The cohorts complete follow-up surveys every 6 months for 36 months (three preceding kiosk implementation and four post-implementation). The study will test the effectiveness of the kiosk on reducing risk behaviours associated with overdose, HIV and hepatitis C, as well as implementation outcomes and cost-effectiveness.Ethics and disseminationThe University of Kentucky Institutional Review Board approved the protocol. Results will be disseminated in academic conferences and peer-reviewed journals, online and print media, and community meetings.Trial registration numberNCT05657106.

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to provide a summary of COVID-19 situation and its effect on academic libraries, the services given by the college libraries during the pandemic situation and how the libraries especially the college libraries have implemented online services during Covid-19 situation. This study tries to understand the functioning and obstacles as well as challenges faced by the college libraries in Cooch Behar during Covid-19 pandemic with regard to their services and performance. Methodology: The survey method has been used to explore the research objective. Sometimes observations methods also used to explore the research objective. The structured questionnaires were mailed to the librarians of the college libraries in Cooch Behar email as well as WhatsApp. A total number of 14 questionnaires were distributed to the college libraries of Cooch Behar district and 100% were received back. Findings: The author highlights some major services provided by the college libraries during Covid-19 pandemic and concludes by showing how the college libraries work collaboratively to support online education systems during pandemic situations. Research limitations: The result of the study is limited to the fourteen college libraries of the Cooch Behar district. Practical implications: The results will be helpful to the other college libraries of Cooch Behar regarding the implementation of online services in their respective institutions. Originality/value: This is original research that identifies the services of college libraries during the pandemic and as well as limitations for implementing those services.

As a financial intermediary, banks contribute to the economic growth of the country by identifying the entrepreneurs with the best chances of successfully initiating new commercial activities and allocating credit to them. However, it is disheartening to note that the number of people with access to the products and services offered by the banking system continues to be very limited even after introduction of inclusive banking initiatives in the country through measures such as the cooperative movement, nationalisation of banks, creational of regional banks, etc. Against this backdrop, we can think about microfinance programme which plays an important role towards financial inclusion. People’s participation in credit delivery, recovery and linking of formal credit institutions to borrowers through the intermediation of self-help Groups (SHGs) have been recognised as a supplementary mechanism for providing credit support to the rural poor. The basic objective of the study is to analyse the role of SHGs towards financial inclusion of the rural poor in Cooch Behar District of West Bengal. From the discussion it is found that after joining the SHGs, 1,37,978 rural poor have been able to connect with the formal financial institutions in the district of Cooch Behar. Thus the microfinance programme in the form of SHG-Bank linkage model has played an important role towards financial inclusion of the rural poor in this district.

The migration of villagers is very much predominant in developing country like India in search of the remunerative enterprise. At present, many farmers are not satisfied with their agriculture production. The villagers struggle to get rid of subsistence livelihood. The shital pati / cool mat weaving is to be one of the potential enterprises for sustainable livelihood generation in the Cooch Behar district of West Bengal. In this perspective, the study was conducted in Dholuabari, Deochorai, Barokodali, Dhalpal villages of Cooch Behar district in West Bengal in December 2019 to January 2020 know the perception of cool mat weaver related to cool mat weaving entrepreneurship. Randomly 100 respondents who were engaged in cool mat production were selected for the study, and from each village 25, of respondents are taken. An interview schedule was designed to collect the primary information where secondary data were collected from panchayat pradhan, mediators, literature, research papers and internet. The study revealed that many farmers were engaged in this enterprise to get more remuneration from secondary agriculture and thereby improve their socio-economic status in a sustainable way.

Terai region of West Bengal fall under high rainfall region but 90% rainfall occurs in kharif season and drought observed during rabi season. NICRA project started in the Cooch Behar District during 2011. The project area and plan of work were selected on the basis of participatory rural appraisal method. The experimental trial was conducted from 2011 to 2019. The objective of the experiment was to development of sustainable irrigation system through renovation of pond and its impact on crop production. It was found from the study that pond renovation has potential impact on increasing crop yield, cropping intensity, copping system and area of irrigation.

The study relates to the socio–economic condition of the respondents who are adopting climate resilient technologies and also not adopting those technologies.The socio-economic characteristics pertaining to demography, means of production, investment, income and expenditure pattern of people living in a particular location strongly influence their responses to technological changes and participation in development schemes. Socio-economic study of villages is mainly for understanding the present condition of villages regarding the lifestyle, education status, and overall development of rural areas. It influences the accessibility to the resources, livelihood pattern, food and nutritional security etc. The present study was conducted in Cooch Behar and Malda districts of West Bengal to know the socio-economic status of the farmers in adopted and non-adopted villages of climate resilient technologies. A total of 120 respondents were randomly selected for the study from the total of 120 respondents 60respondents were selected from climate resilient technologies adopted villages and another 60 respondents were selected from non-adopted villages. It has been found that majority of the respondents from adopted and non- adopted villages were belonging to Below Poverty Line category and climate resilient technologies adopted village respondents were having better Socio- Economic status than the non-Adopted villages.

COVID-19 is an infectious disease which caused severe pandemic to the whole world. Due to its effect of various agricultural sectors such as crop, livestock and fishery have been smash hard by pandemic. The study was conducted to get perception of extent of awareness and its effect due to pandemic of COVID-19 by the rural people in Cooch Behar district of West Bengal. There were 80 respondents from four villages who experienced the negative impact of lockdown due to COVID-19 were selected for the study. The data were collected through well-structured interview schedule with the help of online google form as well as verbal communication in mobile phone. Collected data were compiled and analyzed with simple statistical tools to draw a specific conclusion. The results show that 41.25 per cent of the respondent had high level of awareness on COVID-19 followed by 20.0 per cent had lower level of awareness on corona virus disease. The finding also said that 82.50 per cent of the respondent had faced challenges of lack of opportunities for earning money followed by 72.50 per cent had scarcity of food materials or insufficient of food items in the locality during pandemic of COVID-19. Due to lockdown, the movement of agriculture produces from its place of production to the ultimate consumer has been also affected. It is suggested that some more specific and need based income generating measure is required to taken by the various existing government and non-government organization to reduce the pandemic situation among rural communities.

Pigeon rearing not yet been considered in relation to the contribution of livestock sub-sector, though the pigeons rearing provide alternative source of animal protein. In India, majority of Hindu people believe that it brings happiness to their house. Female pigeons reach sexual maturity at about 5-7 months, laid eggs within 8–12 days after mating, the eggs hatch after 18 days of incubation. The breeding cycle in pigeons is about 2 months, when the cycle finished another breeding cycle begins consecutively. The body weight of mature brooding pigeon (male/female) ranges from 287 g to 290 g depends on the type of breed. Mortality rate of pigeon ranges from 5-15%. The Study was conducted in 4 villages of Cooch Behar district of West Bengal. 40 no. of respondents who were engaged in pigeon rearing are selected purposively. Data were collected through well design structure interviewed schedule and collected data was analyzed. The results revealed that pigeon rearing needs low investment, less care, low feed and low housing cost. The finding shows that benefit cost ratio is 8.72 at 10% of discounting rate for 12 years. Finding implied that it is an easy and economic husbandry practices which have short reproduction cycle and less disease occurrence. On an average, entrepreneur sale their squab at the rate of ₹ 240 per pair. Increasing the rate of pigeon farming may enhance the rate of reducing the gap of requirement of animal protein deficiency, increase income generation and may improve the socio-economic status of the rural poor community. From the findings it shows that pigeon rearing is require less initial investment and provides high income. Hence pigeon farming may be an easy, profitable, sustainable and reliable source of additional employment generation, opportunity for family labour utilization during their leisure time and way of earning quick cash income.

When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. 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