Flat as a Pancake

I'm always astounded when we take off and land on my bi-weekly trips to and from the Netherlands. Everyone knows Holland is flat, and I mean real flat, but just how flat it is cannot be described. I thought parts of the UK were flat, perhaps they are, but there's no comparison. I did a trawl through Flickr and found some photos to illustrate my point, here's the Dutch ones: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And also some of the English landscape, and this was picking photos of 'flat' landscape, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

I also thought that our fields were generally nice and square. Er, not so, and certainly no match for those I've seen when flying over the Dutch landscape. I grabbed a couple of screenshots of satellite images using Google Earth.



Now, the resolution isn't too great and they're 10 miles up, but you can easily see the difference between the long, narrow, drawn-with-a-ruler fields surrounding Schiphol/Amsterdam Airport on the right and the messy, random, wandering borders of the fields surrounding Winchester.