An image from a historian

The following passage, which I read many years ago, has stuck in my memory; or rather, that image of the estuary has. I always thought it was from Jacquetta Hawkes’s A Land but couldn’t find it there, and a reference in Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands made me think I'd perhaps read it in W.G. Hoskins’s The making of the English landscape. I had, and here it is:

W 0 R D S W O R T H in his Guide through the District of the Lakes - one of the best guide-books ever written, for poets make
the best topographers - opens his description of the scenery
of the Lakes with a View of' the Country as formed by
Nature. He then passes, in his second section, to the Aspect
of the Country, as affected by its Inhabitants, and this he
begins by asking the reader to envisage what the landscape,
finished by the great impersonal forces of Nature and awaiting its first human inhabitants, looked like in its primeval
freshness.

He will form to himself an image of the tides visiting and re-visiting the friths, the main sea dashing against the bolder shore,
the rivers pursuing their course to be lost in the mighty mass of
waters. He may see or hear in fancy the winds sweeping over the
lakes, or piping with a loud voice among the mountain peaks and,
lastly, may think of the primaeval woods shedding and renewing
their leaves with no human eye to notice, or human heart to regret
or welcome the change.

How often one has tried to form these images in various
parts of England, seated beside a wide, flooding estuary as
the light thickens on a winter evening, dissolving all the
irrelevant human details of the scene, leaving nothing but
the shining water, the sky, and the darkening hills, and
the immemorial sound of curlews whistling over the mud
and fading river-beaches. This, we feel, is exactly as the
first men saw it when they reached the shingled margin of
the river a hundred generations ago. Nothing has changed.
We are seeing the natural world through the eyes of men who died three or four thousand years ago, and for a moment or two we succeed in entering into the minds of the
dead. Or on some desolate English moorland it is even easier
to feel this identity with the dead of the Bronze Age who lie
near by under a piled-up cairn or under the heathery blanket of a burial-mound. It is easy, too, to feel this kinship
while watching the summer morning waves falling with a
meditative indifference on a beach still untrodden by the
human race. (17-18)

W.G. Hoskins, The making of the English landscape, London, Hodder & Stoughton, second edition 1977

Images like that seem to have been very powerful in my peculiar sensibility. This one could only relate to Britain, I think. There must be a British artist who’s done justice to such a scene, but who? It might be John Piper or Eric Ravilious or Gwen Raverat but I don’t know any work by them that meets the specifications. Or what about a photographer? Fay Godwin?

Pavements in Plogoff

Here’s a large village in Brittany with, running through it, the main road (not very busy) to the Land’s End of Finistère, Pointe du Raz. The commune was working on the layout of roadway, pavement, kerb, crossings, gutter, parking, and I liked what they were doing. In fact, most of it was finished and the masons were building the short, low, free-standing walls I've mentioned before (post of 28.7.08) that provide a support and anchor for flowering plants, prevent parking, separate pedestrians from traffic and look nice. (Click to enlarge.)

To the right of the wall at the front you see the new strip which will be the edge of the pavement. It’s very slightly raised above the level of the roadway but is distinguished from it by its different colour and texture, which makes the street seem wider.

That’s how crossings are done too:

Notice none of the garish yellow lines, or white equivalents, let alone the double ones, that disfigure English towns and villages as if it goes without saying that the aesthetics of the place can be casually sacrificed to the control of parking.

On country roads most you get an unobtrusive broken white line: you don’t park on the roadway side of the line, though you can on the other side if there’s room. This is on the road into Plogoff:

If they want to prevent parking on the pavement, they use walls if there is room or a blue metal barrier or blue posts:

In fact I never discovered the rules for parking. I got the impression that not much enforcement is needed, or they don’t fuss too much about it: those cars on the road on the right may be out of order. It seems the French, at least in these parts, aren’t prepared to ruin the place with lines and signs: the markings were understated and people were expected to be sensible and responsible. Which mostly they were.

I even liked the gutters. (The opposite pavement clearly hasn’t been redone.)

Windmills in Brittany

My inner jury’s out on the aesthetics of windmills in landscapes. France is the place to see them, where they’re called Eoliennes, after Aeolus, the God of the Winds.

I suspect their impact depends more on the state of the sky than that of the land.

If the scene is a bit boring and not pretty, windmills are a definite enhancement.

Up closer, I love their size. Aptly, a friend commented that they recall Triffids -- but he may have meant those other tripod-like creatures in some other John Christopher novel.

In praise of millstone grit

I'm getting to know a patch of terrain in the north-western end of the High Peak. It was a fine June day on Friday-- sun and cloud, breeze--and I walked with Jim from their house in Furness Vale over the top to Hayfield.

Once we were out of Furness Vale and across the valley and the road, a footpath took us up tumbledown steps, then up between ash and sycamore and foxgloves and the odd cuckoo-spit patch to open tracks past upland farms.

We could look back and see the village, the canal, the railway and the straggling houses along the A6, and above them stone walls and lush green fields climbing to bare tops, with ever more tops behind them as we climbed. To the north-west we could pick out the plain of Cheshire and the haze of Manchester and were glad not to be in either.

Along our way sheep and lambs were healthy and men were repairing stone walls. The stone farmhouses near the top were uninhabited and used for farmers’ storage, though we could imagine living in them. Swallows swooped around us; we heard and then saw first curlew, then snipe.

On the higher ground the grass changed to the fine, reddish tickly sort that Jim remembered the feel of on his legs as a kid playing on the rec in Wakefield, mixed with cotton grass and a small delicate misty cream flower whose name I once knew (meadowsweet perhaps?).
Paths that followed the walls took us onto the top of the moor and right to the edge, at Big Rock. This is a millstone grit outcrop of the sort that in other places is called a pulpit or a devil’s altar (above Bingley), protruding over a steep drop into the next valley, along which lay Hayfield.
The browner ground on the left is much higher; it’s the moorland where we stood looking down over the valley, across to the bulk of Kinder and over miles of landscape under skies that went from blue at one end to black at the other.

Then down the slope onto a track, past Peek-a-Boo Farm, across the main road and along a back road into Hayfield for pork pies.

This is close to my ideal environment, and Katy, Jim’s partner, grew up in it. Hills and valleys, moorland and fields, woods and crags, rivers and a canal, stone villages, abandoned buildings, dramatic contours, all on a walkable scale, an intricate variety within a five mile compass. What a place for a kid--and not too different from where I lived till I was 12, on the hills on the Pennine slopes above Bradford. For Katy and her friends, an ok comprehensive school in Hayfield and, at weekends and holidays, two railway lines to Manchester.