Selina Xu

By rail, we travel across England, Wales, and Scotland in a blur of cities and histories, threading through the maps of London, Oxford, Snowdonia, Conwy, Caernarfon, Edinburgh, and York.

History stitches itself, and I pick up its fragments here and there. Led by a Yeoman Warden, we wander around the Tower of London where two of Henry VIII’s wives (including my favorite Anne Boleyn!) were executed, then buried, and where Elizabeth I was briefly imprisoned. At Oxford’s Christ Church Great Hall, we eat dinner in candlelight, surrounded by watchful paintings, including the centerpiece portrait of the college’s founder Henry VIII. In Edinburgh’s 16th-century underground warren of streets, we stare at the spot where Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots) spent a night, after being overthrown by the rebellious Confederate Lords. Inside the Edinburgh Castle, we peer into the room where Mary gave birth to James VI, who would eventually succeed Elizabeth I as the King of England.

This is the Britain of not only Harry Potter and Jane Austen—gothic fantasy and pastoral idyll—but also of unions and uprisings, battles and beheadings, plagues and plunder, sieges and splendor. Elsewhere cities often seem eager to hustle everything into the past, demolishing the old and erecting the new. In the places I visited this time round, I felt the past loom in the foreground.

I’ve been to the UK three times prior, and to me it has always been about West End, museums (so, so many!), the Royal family drama, Oxbridge, afternoon tea, Harry Potter, and Indian food. Venturing out of England and into the vaster lands of Britain has thrown me into landscapes from medieval towns to verdant pastures dotted with white puffy sheep to soaring, breathtaking mountain peaks.

On one train after another, shooting through the countryside, the steady vibration of wheels under my bum, I read and dreamt of journeys receding behind me and unfolding ahead. And the open page of the book on my lap reads, Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.

Here’s what I read:

• Midnight Library by Matt Haig
• Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart by John Guy
• Poor Things by Alasdair Gray