Skippy,
Think we had an edge, having grown up in Kent myself, in that a lot of us could do stuff like that.
Only the big towns like Maidstone, Canterbury, Ashford, Dover, etc ruined the sky with light pollution, DEEP snowdrifts on the hills (12 foot was the most we had) made winter a real season, and a lot of Kent is still wide open spaces - fields, woods, the Downs (if you have to go up it, why is it called a 'down'?), so I've never been afraid of the country, but I used to get scared of cities - all the noise and lights and people and only one smell and speed, and even now HATE cities. Give me a dark country wood with eerie sounds and shadows and bats and foxes and stars throught the canopy any day!