American reacts to 30 geography facts about England that most people never hear about! From unusual landscapes and hidden nat

Alright guys welcome back to the channel. Today we have an exciting suggested video. We have 30 geography facts about England nobody talks about and I definitely thought this would be an interesting one because I have been having fun learning about the UK and I also am a big fun fact person. I love checking out random facts and learning new things I never heard of before so the title nobody talks about really caught me off guard. I'm excited to jump into it. Like I said I have no idea what to expect. I guess we're going to learn some new things. This is England, a small country tucked into the United Kingdom. Wales to the west, Scotland to the north, the Irish Sea to one side, the Celtic Sea to the other. Looks ordinary enough. But this quiet little corner of the world is one of the oldest, strangest, most geologically insane places on Earth. And almost nobody talks about it. Here are 30 facts to prove it. Starting from fact number 30, let's start with a thing nobody expects. There's a plant that grows on one English island and nowhere else in the world, with its own unique beetle. The Lundy cabbage grows only on Lundy, out in the Bristol Channel, and it supports a beetle found on that plant on that island and nowhere else. An entire tiny ecosystem in one spot. It's hidden because it's a scruffy cliff plant on a remote island. Only botanists give it a second look. But I love that England still has corners like this. A whole little world that exists in one place and nowhere else. Fact 29. England is home to most of the world's chalk streams. There are fewer than 300 of these rivers on the entire planet, and around 85% of them are in England. They only form where rainwater filters down through chalk bedrock and comes back up, crystal clear and cool all year round. Fact 28. The oldest human footprints outside Africa were found on an English beach. At Haysburg in Norfolk, people walked across estuary mud around 900,000 years ago and left their footprints, the oldest ever found anywhere beyond Africa. The sea exposed them in 2013 and washed them away within weeks. Real people walking on a beach almost a million years before us. The sea showed us their footsteps for a moment, then quietly took them back. Wow. A million years ago. That is crazy to hear. Yeah. It's always funny when I've been exploring the UK recently, just some of the dates, like how old the history goes back to UK, just comparing it to where I'm from, for example. So to hear like some of the dates that you hear in some of these videos is always mind blowing to hear. 7. Morecambe Bay on England's northwest coast is famous for one thing above everything else, the tide. The bay is so flat, so wide, and so shallow that when the water comes in, it races. Locals say it moves faster than a galloping horse. Fact 26. The hottest temperature ever recorded in the UK happened on the 19th of July 2022 at Coningsby in Lincolnshire, 40.3 degrees Celsius. And it wasn't just one station having a strange day. 46 stations broke the old record on the same day. Roads buckled. Train tracks warped. England had no infrastructure built for it. Because until that afternoon, nobody had seriously planned for it. If you were in England that day, you remember it. That would be some serious heat. That's nuts. I couldn't imagine that. The heat was so hot. Did you see that? Hold on. Geez, how could it get that hot that you literally have the road buckling, just breaking down like that? It literally warped the railroads, too. Let me see that one more time. Train tracks warped. Train tracks warped. Wow, that is nuts. And thankfully, they went out and expected that, I'm sure, before a train rode down, because if a train rode down and the train track was warped like that, I couldn't imagine what would happen. I imagine the train just goes off course, or like I said, I wouldn't even want to see what ends up happening with that. Thankfully, they've seen that. I seriously planned for it. If you were in England that day, you remember it. Fact 25. From the highest to the lowest, Holme Fen in Cambridgeshire sits about 2.75 meters below sea level, the lowest dry land in Britain. But the insane part is that in 1851, someone drove an iron post into the ground to measure how much the land was sinking due to peat drainage. Today, that post sticks up nearly four meters in the air. Stand beside it, and it's a strange, quiet feeling. A single iron post, patiently measuring the ground sinking away beneath everyone's feet. That is nuts to notice. Wow. Look at that. That's crazy how below sea level it actually is. That is kind of nuts to think about. There's a gemstone found in exactly one hill on the entire planet, and it's in Derbyshire. Blue John, a banded purple and yellow stone prized for centuries, is mined in commercial quantities in just one place on Earth, a single hill above Castleton. Most people associate rare gems with exotic places like Madagascar or Myanmar. Having a globally unique mineral inside a single English hill is an incredible geological quirk. Fact 23. So cool. What? Blue John. That was so cool. I want to look that up. This is where I ended up. I guess this is a cavern where they're exactly mining it. You can go visit it. It's super cool. Wow. Some videos spanning over 55 years of the cliff caverns history. Okay. We have the main entrance. What does the main entrance look like? Oh, wow. That's beautiful. Oh, wow. Wow. Okay. Can you order some of this online? I got to order some. This would be super cool to visit. I don't know. I'll be so scared to actually be in a cavern, though, like the idea of like the rocks above your head. It's like freaks me out. Yeah, this is super cool to check out. Incredible geological quirk. Fact 23. Here's a fact for movie lovers. England's south coast has those brilliant white cliffs made of chalk. And chalk is the crushed skeletons of trillions of microscopic sea creatures that lived when this land was under a warm tropical ocean. So every white cliff you've seen in a film is literally a graveyard of plankton. I never knew that. Pressed solid and lifted up on display. Wow. Fact 22. Now we go underground to Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, the biggest gorge in Britain. And in 1903, workers digging a drainage ditch in a cave there uncovered a complete human skeleton, Cheddar Man, around 10,000 years old, the oldest found in Britain. Fact 21. Stay in Somerset because just up the road is Wookie Hole, a series of limestone caverns carved out over thousands of years by an underground river slowly dissolving the rock. Used by people for around 45,000 years ago, leaving Stone Age tools behind in the dark. And the temperature inside stays a steady 11 degrees all year round. So consistently that they actually mature cheddar cheese down there. What? Fact 20. Wait, they actually, okay, that's kind of nuts to hear. 45,000 years ago and the water is just naturally breaking it away to make this natural path. That is so beautiful how, just sit back and pay attention how beautiful life is. Wow, that is nuts. Down in Dorset, there's a stretch called the Jurassic Coast, about 95 miles long. The only place on earth where you can walk past 185 million years of geological history laid out in order like pages in a book. Starting in desert worlds, moving through dinosaur seas, and ending in chalk oceans all on one coastline. Fact 19. And on that... Like a heavy focus so far on England's scenery is just beautiful. I don't know, I'm a big nature person. Whenever I see a lot of green it's just so beauty the nature. In chalk oceans all on one coastline. How beautiful that is, wow. Fact 19, and on that exact coast in the early 1800s, a young girl changed science forever. Mary Anning dug the first complete ichthyosaur out of those cliffs at about 12. Later, the first complete plesiosaur, giant sea reptiles nobody even believed existed, barred from scientific societies while she was alive, Now remembered as one of the most important fossil hunters in history, a girl the world refused to let into the room, who ended up rewriting that room entirely. Fact 18. Why did the... She was barred from scientific... Why? Why was she barred? Why did you just say they wouldn't let her in the room? The fact that she discovered that is crazy because that's huge. That also goes to show is like I was reading that there's actually so much creatures in the sea and so much parts of the sea that we have yet to discover and break down. It's kind of nuts to think about it, like how much is so untapped and undiscovered when it comes to the sea. And the fact that she discovered that much in like 1799, I kind of want to look up as to why she was barred. Okay, I had to look this up real quick. It says Mary Anning was not allowed to join the Geological Society of London because she was a woman. Oh, wow. Okay. During the 19th century, the scientific establishment barred women from membership and even from attending meetings as visitors. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. Something that's huge and beautiful to see is another reason why she was excluded. It says she came from a poor working class family and she was self-taught. Self-taught is crazy back then because. Yeah, the thing back then, we didn't have Google or nothing like that to where you could just go online and actually just teach yourself easily. So to hear she was self-taught is kind of nuts to hear. ...into the room, who ended up rewriting that room entirely. Fact 18. England's geology is basically tilted. The rocks get older as you head northwest, younger as you head southeast. There's even an invisible line geologists draw across the country, splitting the old, hard, high ground of the northwest from the young, soft, low ground of the southeast. England is a book lying on a slope. Oldest pages in one corner, newest in the other. Fact 17. Off the coast of Northumberland sit the Farne Islands, a scatter of rocks that turn into a seabird city every summer. Tens of thousands of puffins, terns, and seals packed onto bare stone. And it was here, in 1838, that a lighthouse keeper's daughter named Grace Darling rode out into a storm to rescue shipwreck survivors, becoming one of Britain's first national heroines. Fact 16. That's crazy. She's so brave for doing that. Unfortunately, it says Sissy passed away pretty soon because she was born in 1815, yet passed away in 1842. That's beautiful that she was brave and actually went out there to do that because yeah, I always really applaud and respect someone like police officers or people that are part of Blue Lights or emergency response teams, someone that's willing to potentially put themselves in harm's way in order to help someone else is beautiful. Lighthouse Keeper's daughter, named Grace Darling, rode out into a storm to rescue shipwreck survivors, becoming one of Britain's first national heroines. Fact 16. The first dinosaur ever named was English, and the word dinosaur was invented here. Megalosaurus was described from an Oxford quarry in 1824, decades before the word existed. Dinosaur itself was coined in England in 1842. When people think of massive land dinosaurs, they picture the sweeping badlands of North America. But the fact that the very first apex land predator was found in a sleepy, landlocked Cotswold quarry near Oxford is a brilliant piece of historical trivia that most people completely miss. Fact 15, there's a sandbank off Kent that swallows ships, and people have played cricket on it. The Goodwin Sands have wrecked over 2,000 ships, yet at low tide, the sand sets so hard that for centuries, people have rowed out to play cricket matches on a sandbank in the middle of the sea. Playing cricket here is highly dangerous, because the tide returns with terrifying speed. In 2006, a BBC crew filming a match had to be dramatically rescued by lifeboats and a helicopter as the sea swallowed the pitch in minutes. A place where even the ground itself doesn't stay still. Oh my, that would be so scary to go out there and play cricket on that. You are brave because, yeah, the sea would definitely be rapidly changing. Look at that. They were not lying. They are really out there playing cricket in the middle of the water. Look. Whoa. Whoa. Okay. Yeah, that is kind of cool. I'm not going to lie. Okay, we're halfway. 15 down, 15 to go. And from here, things get older, weirder, and a lot more violent. How did they get older? You know what the comment section is for. Fact 14. How did they get older? Time to get loud. On the River Severn, there's a phenomenon called the Severn Bore. The Severn Estuary has the second highest tidal range in the entire- Wait, I'm sorry for pausing. I gotta see that. Phenomenon called the- What? Are people surfing on that? The Severn Bore. That is a, that's a crazy picture to look at. I'm not going to lie to you. I've never seen nothing like that. Severn Bore. The Severn estuary has the second highest tidal range in the entire world, with the water rising as much as 15 meters, and when that incoming tide gets funneled into the narrowing river, it forms a single wave that rolls upstream against the current for over 25 miles, and surfers chase it inland. It shouldn't work, but it does. Fact 13. Let's go north to the Pennines, the backbone of England. A long spine of hills down the middle of the north, lifted and folded out of rocks formed when central England sat under warm tropical seas. The high point, Crossfell, reaches 893 meters, and it has its own wind, a cold, vicious thing called the Helm Wind, the only named wind in Britain. Fact 12. It's got its own wind is crazy. Yeah, I couldn't even imagine experiencing the helm wind because you're just so high in the air. So like he just said, not only would it be so cold, but I imagine the wind is probably so strong that it feels like it could probably blow you away. I know it has to be crazy strong being that high in the air. Fact 12. Here's a strange one. At the very southern tip of England, the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, the ground is made of rock that has no business being on dry land at all. It's serpentinite, a green and red stone that normally sits deep beneath the ocean floor, part of the Earth's mantle. And a slow-motion collision of continents hundreds of millions of years ago shoved a slab of ancient seabed up into the daylight. So now, you can walk across a piece of the planet's interior, polished by the waves into something that looks like snake skin. You're literally standing on the inside of the planet. Fact 11. Now into the deep past, to Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, home to some of the oldest rocks in England, around 600 million years old, from the pre-Cambrian. For over a century, scientists thought rock that old couldn't hold fossils. Then, in 1957, A schoolboy spotted a strange, leaf-like impression, a creature now called Charnia, around 560 million years old, one of the oldest complex lifeforms ever found. Fact 10. That's crazy, that's a creature? Charnia, 560 million years ago, that's great. And they said a schoolboy found it, and you didn't even find it that long ago. How long ago was it again? In 1957, a schoolboy spotted a strange... Fact 10. Back to the Lake District for a record that surprises people. England's deepest lake is Wastwater, and it plunges about 79 meters straight down. Its bed sits well below sea level, even though the surface is up in the mountains. The water is brutally cold. Strangely clear, and so low in oxygen that things barely decay down there. A lake so deep and still, it's basically a flooded canyon hiding in the hills. Fact 9. Let's talk borders, because England's are tiny, England shares a land border with only two places, Scotland is 154 kilometers, and Wales about 257. Everything else is coast. The entire land frontier of England is shorter than a single afternoon's drive up a motorway. Fact eight. The Norfolk Broads look ancient and natural, but people dug them. The whole network of lakes is man-made. Medieval people cut out millions of tons of peat for fuel. The pits flooded as sea levels rose, and the result is now a national park. The landscape healed so perfectly that for centuries, everyone assumed it was natural. Until in 1952, botanist Dr. Joyce Lambert proved it was man-made by showing the underwater sides were straight and vertical, carved by human shovels. That is crazy to think that humans did all that. That is nuts, and they did it with all shovels back then. It wasn't no, like, serious equipment. Nothing that we're using nowadays. As sea levels rose, cut out millions of tons of peat for fuel. Lake of Lakes is man-made. Medieval people cut out millions of tons of peat for fuel. The pits flooded as sea levels rose, and the race everyone in Lambert proved by human shovels. Fact 7. England has all the great and vertical carved by human shovels. Fact 7. England has almost no truly wild large predators left, but it does have a secret giant underwater. The Wels catfish. Introduced from Europe, now the largest freshwater fish in the country, the British record is over 150 pounds caught in Essex. What the f***? Look, that fish is bigger than him. If he laid next down to that fish, the fish is definitely taller than him. What? How would you even reel that in? You'd have to have like a real deal fishing rod. Heavier than most grown adults, they sit on the bottom in the dark swallowing prey whole, growing for decades. The land lost its big beasts, but England grew its own monster underwater. Fact six. I wonder what I was so curious. I had to look this up because every now and then I do go fishing. Sometimes I bait they would use use bread as bait or I put a worm on there. So it got me curious. It says Wels catfish in England to even catch that. respond best to big oily and high scent baits. Okay. That appeal to their strong sense of smell and vibration detection. Okay. So Wels catfish relies heavily on smell earthworms. Okay. Earthworms make a lot of sense. Dead baits. Yeah. Dead bait would make a lot of sense because the smells of Liver, squid mussels, live baits, yeah, okay, now I see what type of bait they like. The land lost its big beasts, but England grew its own monster underwater. Fact 6. Down at the far southwest tip of England, in Cornwall, the granite holds something the rest of Britain doesn't. Tin. People have been pulling it out of this ground for around 4,000 years, back to the Bronze Age. Cornwall and Devon were basically Britain's only native source of tin. Traders carried it across the ancient world to the Mediterranean thousands of years before England England was even a country. Those ruined engine houses on the cliffs are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Fact 5. England's largest natural lake is Windermere in the Lake District. About 14.7 square kilometers long and narrow through the hills, those lakes were gouged out by glaciers during the last ice age. Sheets of ice grinding down the valleys then melting and filling them. Every famous lake here is a scar left by ice that vanished over 11,000 years ago. Every lake is by a glacier, it's crazy. Peaceful scenery in England is the wreckage of an ice age. Wow. Fact four. Right at the very top of England sits a town that spent hundreds of years unsure which country it belonged to. Berwick-upon-Tweed. England and Scotland both wanted it, so they kept snatching it from each other. About 13 times until England kept it for good in 1482. But why fight so hard over one small town? Well, because of where it sits. Right where the border meets the sea, the last piece of England before the North Sea, like a gate. And whoever held the gate controlled the way in. Now here's the strange part. Stand in Berwick today, and you're closer to Norway than to Cornwall, way down at the other end of England, because England is so long and thin that reaching Cornwall means crossing nearly the whole country, about 680 kilometers. While Norway is just a short hop across a narrow sea around 580. I definitely understand why that was a high sought after area. Just the location of it is like, I don't know, you can just tell how Scotland and England would go back and forth over that. Fact 3. Now think about what England is built on. Beneath the Midlands and the North sit some of the richest coal seams in the world. Coal that's fossilized swamp forest from over 300 million years ago when this land sat near the equator under steaming jungle. The first industrial nation on Earth ran on a buried tropical forest. The modern world kick-started by ancient swamps. Fact two, you would never even expect that off as a swamp. Coal was being mined there, you know. The first industrial nation on Earth ran on a buried tropical forest. The modern world kick-started by ancient swamps. Fact 2. and the North sit some of the richest coal seams in the world. Coal that's fossilized swamp forest from over 300 million years ago in Northumberland with ancient swamps. Fact 2. England has a herd of wild cattle that hasn't mixed with any other for 700 years. What? The Chillingham cattle in Northumberland have been sealed off and breeding only among themselves for around seven centuries. Wild, white, and genetically unlike any other cattle on earth. Wow. The herd lives entirely inside a private, walled parkland estate. Right. Unless you intentionally seek out a guided tour with a park warden, you will never see them. I wanted to go back and look at the picture of one time because he said they're genetically unlike any other cattle on earth. Yeah, it's crazy to think they've been sealed off for that long. And also, yeah, they definitely they don't look like any cattle I've ever seen, especially where I'm from. Look at those. Those are beautiful. And finally fact one. The map that changed the world was made by one Englishman in 1815. He wasn't a rich scientist. William Smith was a canal surveyor who worked down mines and ditches. There he noticed the rock layers always came in the same order, each with its own fossils. So you could tell what lay buried far below just by reading the ground. And he turned that into the first geological map of a whole country. The foundation of modern geology and the reason we still find coal, water, and oil today. But richer men copied his work and took the credit. Smith went bankrupt, even landing in prison for his debts, and was only honored as the father of English geology near the end of his life. A quietly world-changing achievement by a working man who was cheated out of the fame. And there's no grand monument to point people to it. He handed us the ground beneath our feet and got a prison cell in return. So the least we can do is remember his name, William Smith. And that's England. Wow, hold on. Can I hear that one more time? I'm sorry, I gotta hear that one more time. That was kind of nuts how you just hit us with a 180 right there. The foundation of modern geology and the reason we still find coal, water, and oil today. But richer men copied his work and took the credit. Smith went bankrupt, even landing in prison for his debts, and was only honored as the... He copied them, took his work, and then he ended up in prison for his debts. Father of English Geology near the end of his life. William Smith stayed with Edward Webb Surveyor in this house from 1887 to 1791. Smith's pioneering geological map of Britain in 1815 earned him the title Father of English Geology. Wow. A quietly world-changing achievement by a working man who was cheated out of the fame. And there's no grand monument to point people to it. He handed us the ground beneath our feet and got a prison cell in return. So the least we can do is remember his name, William Smith. And that's England, 30 facts deep, and we've barely scratched the surface. For every fact on this list, there are a hundred more buried in the cliffs, caves, coastlines, and quiet little villages that never make it into the textbooks. So here's a challenge for you. I gave you 30 facts, but there might be one hiding right where you live that beats every single one. The kind of thing only locals know, and nobody outside ever hears about. So prove it, drop it in the comments. And until the Yeah, let me know if you're from England and there are some interesting facts you know about England. I always love fun facts. This was an interesting video to check out. The biggest thing I always learn from these videos is just crazy to realize like the history of England, for example, like some of the dates you hear and how far just how vast the history is, is nuts. Yeah, I always enjoy videos like this because I'm just so used to seeing. what i'm used to where i'm from it's always beautiful to like hop and check out videos like this and just see places and things you never would have seen before i know this video doesn't do justice to be there in person would be mind-blowing to see but still just to take a step and just see like the videos like if you enjoyed this video all i ask is you guys leave a like on the video so i know to keep making more for you guys comment down below another video to check out for the channel i read down all the comments and i want to appreciate you I appreciate you guys for all the love and continued support. This has been Melo, and I'm out. Peace.