For more than a thousand years the Afon Conwy - the River Conway to the English - provided a military gateway into the heart of North Wales, firstly for the legions of Rome and then the English armies seeking to subdue the people of Wales. In later, more peaceful times, it proved a seemingly impossible barrier to the spread of transport links which sought to open up new and improved communications with Ireland - a barrier that can prove troublesome even today. A Postcard from the Conwy takes the reader on a journey in words and pictures along the entire length of the river and its headwaters, using more than 200 old postcards from the authors' extensive collections. It is a pictorial record of soaring mountains and tranquil lakes, majestic bridges and castles, houses great and small, sailing boats and steamers - all immortalised by past generations of photographers and artists for the benefit of innumerable tourists and travellers.

The steep western ridge of the Cotswolds has a commanding view of the Severn Valley, the Malvern Hills and the Forest of Dean. To the north is an equally impressive view of the Vale of Evesham, the Worcester plain and Bredon Hill. The source of many rivers, including the Windrush and Thames, are found in the high uplands dipping towards the Oxford plain, and in the south sits the city of Bath. The 790 square miles that comprise the Cotswolds formed between 200 to 150 million years ago and were then shifted, twisted and arranged over the next 100 million. Moreover, in the past ten thousand years, human activity has further shaped and altered the land through agriculture, trade, transport, building of towns and cities - constantly changing, but at the same time adding to the stunning appearance of this landscape. Dry stonewalls criss-cross hills and valleys marking out arable fields and pastures for sheep and cattle, farmhouses built in Oolithic weathered limestone, villages and towns built of the same honey-coloured stone all radiate the warm mellow colour of this local bedrock - the very foundation of this range of hills. A Postcard from the Cotswolds describes this outstandingly picturesque region in words and pictures as immortalised by earlier generations of photographers and artists for countless tourists and visitors to this exceptional part of England.

The Wye flows for more than 130 miles, from the high slopes of Plynlimon in Wales to the Severn Estuary, passing through some of the most picturesque scenery in Britain en route. Indeed, the Wye Valley was the birthplace of modern tourism - when many eighteenth-century travellers undertook the English equivalent of the Grand Tour. By the nineteenth century, when the railway had arrived, many enterprising locals were running boat tours along the river, stopping off at Goodrich, Chepstow and Tintern to take in the 'picturesque landscape', and famous names such as Pope, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Thackeray had all made the pilgrimage here. By 1850 more than twenty accounts of the Wye tour had been published. A Postcard from the Wye takes the reader on a journey in words and pictures along the entire length of the river, using more than 200 postcards from the authors' extensive collections. It is a record of how the river once was, including its industrial heritage as well as more rural scenes, and shows how it was immortalised by earlier generations of photographers and artists for the benefit of innumerable tourists and travellers.

This book takes the reader on a pictorial journey along the entire length of the Dee in over 200 old picture postcards, accompanied by informative captions. Our journey starts in North Wales, high above the village of Llanuwchllyn, by a stream which flows from ancient rocks into a sheet of still, deep water called Lake Bala. It is from this source that the River Dee flows. The river wanders through the former counties of Merionethshire and Denbighshire, and eventually reaches the town of Llangollen, home of the international Eisteddfod. With romantic views of the ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey and Castell Dinas Bran, and scenes of the Dee as it flows over Telford's Horseshoe Falls, we leave Wales and head into England. Crossing the border, the Dee meanders through low-lying farmland into Cheshire where it encounters the historic city of Chester. We now accompany the Dee on the final leg of our pictorial journey as it turns through the Cheshire and Flintshire countryside and emerges into the estuary to form the natural coastal boundary between the Wirral peninsula and North Wales.

The Mersey's 70-mile journey to the Irish Sea starts with the merging of the rivers Goyt and Tame at Stockport in Greater Manchester. At Irlam the course of the Mersey is briefly diverted into the Manchester Ship Canal, where its waters combine with another captive river, the Irwell. Soon released from this manmade constraint the Mersey continues to flow unimpeded for the remainder of its journey - flowing past Warrington and through the Runcorn Gap - into the throat of Liverpool Bay. For centuries the Mersey has served as the natural boundary between Cheshire and Lancashire, its tidal flow washing through the developing conurbation of Merseyside which comprises the port of Liverpool, Birkenhead and the former coastal resort of New Brighton at the mouth of the estuary. This book takes the reader on a journey in words and pictures along the lower reaches of the river, its navigable companion the Manchester Ship Canal and the coast of Liverpool Bay, using more than 200 old photographs. It is a record of a major waterway with its ports, docks, warehouses, cargo ships and ocean liners immortalised by past generations of photographers for the benefit of visitors and travellers from around the world.

Flowing for nearly 100 miles through gently rolling countryside at the very heart of England, the Avon is one of the most quintessentially English rivers in the country. Visiting places such as Naseby, Warwick, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Evesham and Tewkesbury, this book captures visions of the river as it used to be, from ye olde battlefields through to Edwardian tourism with, of course, plenty of Shakespearian history. A companion volume to the authors' A Postcard from the Severn and A Postcard from the Wye, this book takes the reader on a journey in words and pictures through the five counties traversed by the Avon, using images from more than 250 postcards drawn from the authors' collections - many posted to friends and relatives by some of the innumerable visitors to the river and its world-famous associated attractions. It is a record of how the river and its surroundings once appeared, and how they were immortalised by earlier generations of photographers and artists, printers and publishers.