Midland England
Even little Rutland has two entirely different faces; the airy limestone uplands to the north with their characteristic silver-grey stone villages and walls and far views; and the close, tumbled country of sudden little hills, of orchard and thick hedges and golden ironstone, in the south towards the Welland.

Leicestershire is just as strikingly divided between east and west; the west as dull as anything that England can show, almost level claylands as far as the eye reaches, broken by ugly little factory-villages of red brick, and the east a landscape of sharp hills, woodland, stone-built villages and many fine churches, all because there is stone underfoot and not a hundred-foot thickness of clay.

And as for Charnwood Forest, there is nothing quite like it elsewhere in England, a triassic landscape rising untamed out of the most conventional countryside one could imagine.

W. G. Hoskins Midland England (1949)