On February 9th in 1855, residents of Devon, England awakened to a find a light snow cover blanketing the landscape, rendering the bucolic countryside a whiter shade of pale.

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All sides have been keen to stress the need to act as custodians of the countryside, protecting the landscape from US-style low-rise sprawl.

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In the line of hills that divide the sepia-tinted Tuscan landscape south of Arezzo from the even more rapturous countryside around Siena, Castel Monastero has watched nearly a thousand years go past.

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Searle drug fortune, bought the ethereal Edgar Degas pastel "Landscape with Smokestacks, " a view across a windswept countryside, in 1987.

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Despite Hong Kong's reputation as a landscape of concrete and glass, in fact, three-quarters of its land is countryside.

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This may go some way to address another of CPRE's concerns - that the countryside will be dotted with small farmers' turbines, radically altering the look of the landscape.

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