Just saw this topic late last night. A few follow-ups:
*One thing that a lot of people don't understand about the magazine world is that writers are not responsible for display copy (headlines and deks). I may suggest display language for the print issue, but my editors can and do take it or leave it. This piece is an online addendum to the print feature, which I lobbied my editors to post because I really wanted to show readers a few photos of the heathlanders--I knew only 2-3 images would accompany the story in print. Online display copy is even further out of my orbit because sub-editors there are guided by SEO and other imperatives that I don't understand. I find this frustrating, but there's not much that can be done about it.
*Mark Pearce: I haven't been to The Berkshire. I can't call it an oversight as it is/was a large blip on my radar; I simply ran out of time. The heathlands are an incredibly deep golf destination--the time it takes to explore everything worth seeing, as far as I can tell, needs to be measured in months. Adam Lawrence suggested I head down to Hankley, in part to give readers a lesser-known name to consider and in part to take a look at its heather swath--which is, in fact, vast and glorious. (Hankley sells its heather to clubs all over the region.) I would say it's worth seeing as part of a longer tour just for that reason alone, though I would agree that its architecture is not in the Sunningdale/Swinley class.
*Tony Muldoon: I hesitate to speak for Simon Chapman, but the impression I got from our interview is that the ancient Britons OVER-grazed the lands that are now the heathlands.