Pastoral Panoramas (1950)

• 60%
• 1950
• Documentary

This Traveltalks entry highlights rural areas of England. The narrator tells us that after World War II, England launched a national effort to turn more of its land to agriculture. The amount of acreage was increased from two million to eight million, and the amount of food imports has decreased from one-half to less than one-third of the total supply. We see families working on their crops. We stop at the village of Bradford-on-Avon, with its thatched roofs, some of which are several feet thick. The next stop is Stoke Poges, the burial place of British poet Thomas Gray. We see the cemetery that inspired his famous poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". We then make a short visit to the Cambridge American Military Cemetery, the final resting place for many American service members who lost their lives fighting in Europe in World War II. As the camera pans across the rows of grave markers, the narrator quotes several lines from Theodore O'Hara's poem, "The Bivouac of the Dead".