Hampshire's county town, Winchester, was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Wessex - the only Anglo-Saxon kingdom not to fall to the Vikings. Alfred the Great's bones rested somewhere within or near the cathedral until they were lost during the Reformation. The Church of England Diocese of Winchester, founded in 676 AD, still covers roughly two-thirds of the county. Winchester served as one of the capitals of England until the Norman Conquest moved the centre of gravity to London. The city's medieval cathedral is the longest medieval cathedral in Europe by total length. In its retrochoir lies the tomb of the bishop St Swithun, whose feast day on 15 July is also Hampshire's official county day - the saint whose weather, popular tradition holds, will hold for forty days from whichever way it leans.

Hampshire's south coast has been a launchpad for almost every major British naval venture since the medieval period. Portsmouth's working naval base - the oldest in the Royal Navy and home to two-thirds of its surface fleet - sits at the eastern end of a continuous urban belt that runs through Fareham and Gosport. Southampton's docks handle a vast share of British container freight and base the largest fleet of cruise liners in the UK. In April 1912, the Titanic sailed from Southampton's White Star Dock on her first and only voyage; about a third of those lost were Southampton residents. The Sea City Museum tells the story now. In 1944, Operation Overlord's southern flank, including the Mulberry Harbours and most of the naval support, departed from Portsmouth. The dockyards have shaped, fed, and bled the cities around them for centuries.

Jane Austen lived most of her life in Hampshire. Her father George was the rector of Steventon, a small parish in the north of the county. After her father's death she eventually settled with her mother and her sister Cassandra at Chawton, where her brother Edward owned a cottage. There, between 1809 and her death in 1817, she revised and published Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park, and wrote Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey. She is buried in the north aisle of Winchester Cathedral. Chawton House and the cottage are both museums today. Across the county at Lyndhurst, in the New Forest, Alice Hargreaves - born Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland - is buried in the churchyard of St Michael and All Angels.

William the Conqueror laid out the New Forest in 1079 as a hunting reserve, displacing villages and setting savage forest law that protected the king's deer above his subjects. Nearly a thousand years later, the New Forest National Park covers 219 square miles of heath, ancient pasture woodland, and open commons - one of the largest remaining tracts of unenclosed lowland in southern England. About 5,000 ponies, cattle, donkeys, and pigs roam the commons under the ancient rights of the New Forest Commoners, who pasture their animals on a system that predates the National Park by centuries. Wild fallow, sika, red, and roe deer still wander the woods. The National Motor Museum at Beaulieu sits inside the park. The Forest gets about 7.5 million visitors a year - tourists, walkers, campers, all watching out for ponies that don't always feel like getting out of the road.

The game of cricket was largely worked out in south-east England, with one of the first organised clubs forming at Hambledon, in Hampshire, in 1750. The Hambledon Club codified many of cricket's early laws and produced some of the first identifiable star players. Hampshire County Cricket Club, a first-class team since 1864, plays at the Rose Bowl near West End - the same ground that hosted its first Test match in 2011. Down the road in Southampton, the world's oldest surviving bowling green has been in continuous use since 1299; bowlers still play on it today. And on a Hayling Island beach in 1958, a teenager named Peter Chilvers, working out from a kite-shaped board and a homemade rig, became - according to a British court ruling decades later - the actual inventor of the windsurfer. The court case settled an international patent dispute. The board is in the Solent Sky Museum.

Hampshire still makes things that fly. The Farnborough International Airshow, held in even-numbered Julys at Farnborough Airport, is one of the world's largest aerospace trade events; it grew out of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, which carried out aviation R&D at Farnborough from 1908 until its closure in the 1990s. Solent Sky Museum in Southampton tells the story of the city's flying-boat industry and the Supermarine Spitfire, designed by R.J. Mitchell at Woolston in 1936. The Royal Aircraft Establishment's first British powered flight was at Farnborough in 1908. Aldershot, just up the road, has been home of the British Army since 1854. If the county has a single thread running through its 1.8 million people, it might be this: Hampshire has spent the last thousand years sending people, ships, and aircraft out into the rest of the world.