The City of Winchester温切斯特市Many visitors to Great Britain who make a point of visting

The City of Winchester

温切斯特市

Many visitors to Great Britain who make a point of visting the famous cultural shrines of Stratford, Oxford , Cambridge and Canterbury are less aware of the equally rewarding historical interest and the friendly individuality of the ancient capital, the city of Winchester.

This Hampshire centre of around 30,000 inhabitants has welcomed (and, on various occasions, repulsed) a succession of visitors for nearly three thousand years. Early tribes occupied it from time to time, and much later the Roman colonisers established a commercial centre with solidly-constructed straight roads radiating from it. It was Alfred the Great who, in the ninth century, made the small town the national centre of learning, though his statue dominating the main street recalls the warrior with raised cross-like sworD．Norman succeeded Sxon and soon the cathedral, one of the loveliest and richest in architectural interest in England, was being erected.A college was founded in the fourteenth century and even though a decline in the wood trade led to a period of economic stagnation, the college maintained the town's tradition of learning and is one of the most famous public schools of today.

Present-day traffic has destroyed much of the peace of the city centre. Private cars and buses which surge through the narrow streets at weekends may be supplemented on weekdays by lorries roaring on their way to Southampton. And yet away from the busier roads, the prevailing atmosphere remains one of calm meditation and contentment. From the smooth sun-flecked lawns of the Close, patterned with leaf-shadows from gently stirring foliage, rises the cathedral, its comfortable, square, late-Norman tower, its Norman transepts and severe Gothic nave suggesting that the beauty created by man, though not imperishable, may survive wars and revolutions, and represent the endurance of traditional values even in an age of undignified scurrying change.Certain houses round the Close may have provided homes for the loyal subjects of the first Queen Elizabeth when Shakespeare was learning to write. The youth Hostel, a mill standing on the city's river, is more than two hundred years olD．In well-mannered unobtrusiveness,the old buildings of the main street blend with the new, and a walk through the town centre is one of enjoyable discoveries.

The rounded hills of Southern England, among which the city is built, shelter a country-side of farms and picturesque villages, where, despite motor transport and television, many of the old rural traditions and mental attitudes are preserveD．

Winchester belongs to its surroundings: it is the appropriate centre of a region of prosperous,quiet, richly-green countryside. Lively, up-to-date and friendly, it maintains very many English traditions of fine domestic and ecclesiastical architecture, of graciousness and imperturbability, of richly inventive variety and peaceful dignity which are among the highest achievements of all those English planners and designers who created the heritage we now enjoy.

It appears that many visitors to Great Britain______.

A．find the city of Winchester very attractive

B．think Winchester comparable to other places of interest

C．are aware of the historical importance of Winchester

D．know less about Winchester than about other famous cultural shrines