Berkshire
The County of Berkshire lies just west of London in the fertile Thames Valley. Known as 'Royal Berkshire' due to its connections with the royal family, it is the home of Windsor Castle, Eton public school and Ascot Racecourse.
Bounded by Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire to the north, by Wiltshire to the west, by Hampshire to the south and by Surrey to the south-east, the county of Berkshire covers an area of approximately 1,262 square kilometres (roughly 500 square miles). It has a population of approximately 763,000 inhabitants and its main towns comprise the city of Reading, Slough, Maidenhead, Bracknell, Newbury and Windsor.
Well-served by transport systems, with the M4 flowing directly through it and Heathrow airport on its borders, the area is heavily linked with the computer industry. With a significant number of hi-tech companies based there, it has become known to many as the 'Silicon Valley'.
An area of wonderful countryside and quaint villages — including the lovely settlements of Boxford, Cookham, East Garston, Hurley and Sonning — Berkshire is a keystone in the heartland of Southern England. With the River Thames as its northern border, the country changes from the sand, gravel and flat fertile fields of the Thames Valley, where sudden heights such as Windsor rise above loops of the Thames, to the Chiltern Hills, mixed with heathland and expanding beyond Reading to chalk uplands, the Berkshire Downs and high grasslands around Lambourn.
From the north you progress to chalk hills in the west, then the edge of Cotswold Country. It's ultimate English countryside, simple and pleasurable. Though Berkshire has excellent infrastructure running through it, it is still veined with country roads and tiny leafy lanes and remains, essentially, a rural county.
