1. In which county is the apple tree that supposedly inspired Isaac Newton’s Theory of Gravity?
2. The Dales Way is an 80-mile trek that runs from Ilkley to where?
3. What place in the UK is often referred to as the ‘home of cricket’ and is also home to the world’s oldest sporting museum?
4. Which UK beach featured in the films Robin Hood and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?
5. What is the name of Scotland’s oldest purpose-built visitor attraction?

(Questions courtesy of UK Attraction)

Check your answers here!

The Commonwealth Roll of Honour Project warmly welcomes new volunteers or anyone who wishes to submit information.

Aim

This project exists to create a photo archive of the graves and memorials to Commonwealth Servicemen who have fallen in service since the beginning of World War One to the present day.

The aim of this project is to work in conjunction with the governments or similar bodies in each Commonwealth Country to develop or contribute to a source of free online information on their war casualties. The hope is to include all the information possible, including attestation papers, service records, medal records, war diaries, photographs of headstones and memorials and any other information available. Project Director Mike Symmonds has already been working with the Veterans Affairs Canada team for the last year or so and hopes also to be working with the New Zealand and South African governments, whom he has been in contact with for the last few weeks.

The project moves forward through volunteers who photograph the headstones and memorials and through relatives of the servicemen who contribute information to the site.

It seems that within a few years, memories and records of the lives of our Armed Forces slip into obscurity. In certain areas, cemeteries have fallen into such a state of decay that it is sometimes difficult even to enter them safely.

The Project’s mission is to see their names are not forgotten. Without the help of dedicated volunteers the Project would not exist.

Volunteers

There are approximately 55 active volunteers throughout UK and the rest of the world but more are needed to fulfil this massive project, especially Co-ordinators at the County, Province or Département level. You are warmly invited to join the Project team and help leave a lasting online memorial to all our fallen service personnel.

The task

Of the 1.7 million men and women killed during the First and Second World Wars, 925,000 are in marked graves scattered around 2,500 cemeteries worldwide.

Project so far

Around 40,000 digital photographs have been taken so far and are now being processed to be accessible on the website. At any one time there are between 10 and 40 requests for photographs or information from family members.

Requirements

Volunteers are still very much required throughout the UK and elsewhere, especially anyone based in Northern Europe, where the large majority of the British graves are to be found.

As the process of uploading pictures is relatively time consuming, digital photos are preferred, to save scanning time. As the Project is purely volunteer and non-profit, the cost of developing thousands of photographs would be a major constraint.

In view of the cost of a photograph from the private websites such as the Maple Leaf Legacy and the War Graves Photographic Project, there will be no cost or donation request from this project for a photo request.

Quote from Mike Symmonds, Project Director

“Not a single day goes by that I do not find this project intensely moving. I hope that you find something similar here for yourself, and warmly encourage anyone to contribute to the project.”

For further information please

From Diagon Alley to the Leaky Cauldron, take a private black taxi tour of Harry Potter sites by black taxi. Nobody knows the streets of London like a cab driver, and each taxi can hold up to five wizards and/or Muggles. This is your chance to put yourself in the shoes of Harry Potter and friends as you tour the sights of London!

Highlights

• Three-hour private tour of London’s Harry Potter locations by black taxi
• Private tour led by your expert driver-guide
• Exclusive to Viator: Visit the locations featured in the fifth film in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Choice of morning or afternoon tours
• Pick-up and drop-off from central London hotels

Hop aboard and your expert taxi driver/guide will take you to the sites made famous by the Harry Potter series. First stop is Diagon Alley, where Harry and his friends visit at the start of every school year to pick up their supplies of spell books, robes, wands and other items in preparation for their return to Hogwarts.

Walk through the wall to get to platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station where the Hogwarts Express departs. Then see the place where Harry and Ron stole Ron’s father’s flying car. Stand on the bridge where the Knight bus crossed the Thames from the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and visit the all-new Leaky Cauldron.

Follow Harry’s flight to London with Dumbledore’s Army and see the bridges, buildings and ships they pass along the way. Enter the telephone box that descends into the Ministry of Magic below. Stand right where Harry and Voldemort come face to face for the first time since the Triwizard tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Last stop is the Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, which is also home to Harry’s beloved godfather, Sirius Black.

This tour offers fantastic value for money, comfortably seating up to five passengers for one fixed price!

The tour is exclusive to Viator so please click on the link below to find out more and to book online.

Viator: Private Tour: "Harry Potter" Black Taxi Tour of London

For more information about the St Leger and to book online, please visit the Doncaster Racecourse website.

For other excursions and activities in the north of England, why not see what Viator has to offer?

For worldwide excursions, tours and tickets, please visit our main Viator page.

(We earn commission at no extra cost to you on any bookings made using our links, so please help us to keep the site going by using our links. Thank you.)

Hotel Novotel Edinburgh Park
15 Lochside Avenue
EDINBURGH
EH12 9DJ

Having booked a flight with Ryanair from Edinburgh to Malta that departed at 0610, it was pretty well inevitable that we were going to want somewhere to crash out for a couple of hours at least after the long drive down the A9 and M90. The Novotel Edinburgh Park offered the cheapest nearby option.

We booked the room online via the ever excellent Agoda. Bizarrely, it was £10 cheaper to book a room with breakfast than without – though since we weren’t expecting to be around for breakfast anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered to us if breakfast had been more expensive.

On being informed in advance that special assistance was required, the hotel provided an excellent wheelchair, which they allowed me to keep for the duration of our stay. They also gave us a specially adapted room with facilities for disabled people such as a roll-in shower with seat, all of which made things so much easier. The room itself was quite nice too.

The staff were friendly and helpful too – the receptionist who checked us in even came out to the car to help me into the chair and to help carry our bags to the room – so at first I was quite impressed by this place.  We’ve stayed at another Novotel before and didn’t enjoy the experience so we were pleasantly surprised at this one.

However, the pleasure was short-lived when we discovered that the WiFi was unusable because the signal was too weak.  They suggested we tried their cable service instead, which we did, but neither we nor they could get that to work either.

They then suggested we could use their free Internet facility in the lobby instead, but having got settled into the room that didn’t seem like a very convenient option for us.  Finally, they said not to worry – their maintenance person would fix it in the morning.  But since we were checking out at about 4am that wasn’t much good to us either.

The food was relatively expensive, as one would expect from an airport hotel, but the £3 room service charge seemed a bit excessive.

At check-in, the receptionist was explaining where breakfast was served when Dave mentioned that we would be checking out very early and so would miss it. She immediately offered to provide us with two breakfast bags so that we would at least have something to eat at the airport. This sounded great.

Sure enough, when we checked out, the receptionist (a different one by this time) went and fetched two large bags for us. Each consisted of two Danish pastries (apple and chocolate), a rather squashed-looking croissant (but no butter or other spread), an apple, a vanilla-flavoured yoghurt, a raspberry-flavoured drinking yoghurt and a carton of orange juice. We weren’t really in the mood for any of it, although Dave later drank one of the raspberry yoghurts and reported that it tasted quite nice.

All in all what could have been a good hotel stay was marred by the lack of Internet in the room.

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)