Topical Tens: 29 July: Buckinghamshire Day

Saturday, 29 July 2017

29 July: Buckinghamshire Day

Today is Buckinghamshire Day, a celebration of the English county of Buckinghamshire. Here are ten things about the placed you may not have been aware of:

The county gets its name from the town in the north of it - Buckingham, which means "where Bucca lives". Bucca was an Anglo-Saxon landowner.
The traditional Flag of Buckinghamshire comprises Red and Black halves with a White Swan.
The county town is Aylesbury. Other towns include Milton Keynes, Marlow, Beaconsfield, Amersham and High Wycombe.
Celebrities from Buckinghamshire include author Terry Pratchett, musicians Nick Beggs and Howard Jones, actress Lynda Bellingham and rower Steve Redgrave. Many more celebrities have called it home - Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary, John Milton, Jerome K. Jerome, Enid Blyton, Nancy Astor, Benjamin Disraeli, Cilla Black, Roy Castle, Iain Duncan Smith, Ian Dury, Noel Gallagher, Sir David Jason, Sir John Gielgud, Mike Oldfield, Ozzy Osbourne, Florence Nightingale and Terry Wogan. Also located in the county is Chequers, the country retreat of the British Prime Minister.
Another place with a political connection is the Chiltern Hills, location of the Chiltern Hundreds. Members of the British Parliament are by tradition prohibited from resigning their seats, so if they want out, they have to disqualify themselves by appointment to an "office of profit under the Crown" and Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds is one of the two offices they can apply for.
The two highest points in Buckinghamshire are Haddington Hill in Wendover Woods at 267 metres (876 ft) above sea level, and Coombe Hill near Wendover at 260 metres (850 ft). The River Thames and the River Great Ouse flow through the county and the main branch of the Grand Union Canal passes through it as well.
One of Buckinghamshire's tourist attractions is the Bekonscot Model Village in Beaconsfield, the oldest model village in the world. It was built in 1928 by a wealthy accountant whose wife had demanded that his model train set must no longer be kept in the house, so he built the village in the grounds to accommodate his trains. It was opened to the public the following year, and all of its profits go to charity.
Buckinghamshire is the location of Bletchley Park, the site of World War II British codebreaking and Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic digital computer.
The graveyard where Thomas Gray wrote his Elegy in a Country Churchyard is at Stoke Poges church in Buckinghamshire.
Milton Keynes has the longest shopping centre in the world and over 40 million trees. It's also an anagram of silent monkey.