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Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places
In Landskipping, Anna Pavord explores some of Britain's most iconic landscapes in the past, in the present, and in literature. With her passionate, personal, and lyrical style, Pavord considers how different artists and agriculturists have responded to these environments. Like the author's previous book The Tulip, Landskipping is as sublime and picturesque as its subject.
Landskipping features an eclectic mix of locations, both ecologically and culturally significant, such as the Highlands of Scotland, the famous landscapes of the Lake District, and the Celtic hill forts of the West Country. These are some of the most recognizable landscapes in all of Britain. Along the way, Pavord annotates her fascinating journey with evocative descriptions of the country's natural beauty and brings to life travelers of earlier times who left fascinating accounts of their journeys by horseback and on foot through the most remote corners of the British Isles.
Landskipping features an eclectic mix of locations, both ecologically and culturally significant, such as the Highlands of Scotland, the famous landscapes of the Lake District, and the Celtic hill forts of the West Country. These are some of the most recognizable landscapes in all of Britain. Along the way, Pavord annotates her fascinating journey with evocative descriptions of the country's natural beauty and brings to life travelers of earlier times who left fascinating accounts of their journeys by horseback and on foot through the most remote corners of the British Isles.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 28, 2016
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228 people want to read
About the author
Anna Pavord
32 books44 followersAnna Pavord is the gardening correspondent for THE INDEPENDENT and the author of widely praised gardening books including PLANT PARTNERS and THE BORDER BOOK. She wrote for the OBSERVER for twenty years, has contributed to COUNTRY LIFE, ELLE DECORATION and COUNTRY LIVING, and is an associate editor of GARDENS ILLUSTRATED. For the last thirty years she has lived in Dorset, England where she is currently making a new garden. Constantly experimenting with new combinations of flowers and foliage, she finds it a tremendous source of inspiration. -http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/anna...
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November 1, 2019Ah. Oh. Erm.
The title is not wrong. Landskipping. It is about the land, well the British land, and Anna Pavord's book skips about from how the landscape was regarded in culture in the eighteenth century, then it skips to the agricultural improvers who looked at the landscape in a completely different way to the painters, poets, and writers on aesthetics, another skip takes us into Dorset, little skips throughout the text takes us sideways in Pavord's childhood and her feelings towards and appreciation of certain (British) landscapes. In short it reminds me very much of Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory except entirely fixated on the British Isles and only ranging from the eighteenth century to the present.
In the first section of the book she takes in Gainsborough and Constable, there are two ideas here I think one is about valuing certain types of wild landscapes, the other is about appreciating landscapes like the one in which you grew up in. There was, Pavord says, a search for awe inspiring, wild and majestic landscapes in Britain, as a consequence of wars with France with blocked access to Italy and the Alps for young men on the Grand Tour - I liked this argument upon reading it but after some time I remembered a certain playful little book - A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy in which I recalled the narrator remembered half way across the channel that England and France were at war and he didn't have a passport - despite which he travels on to Paris and gets said document, then I recalled that even after the Revolution that Wordsworth went on a walking tour through France to Alpine regions, this also exposed one of the great weaknesses in the book - across Europe there was a movement from an interest in Italian or Alpine landscapes to local equivalents or alternatives, a slow movement across hundreds of years admittedly, but for what ever the cause it happened.
There is an overlap between this desire for the Romantic and the sublime in the landscape in her discussion of Thomas Johnes estate of Hafod in Cardiganshire in Wales (pp.78-90), much impressed by the potential in the mountains, hills and crags Johnes had over two million trees planted to provide suitably charming views for a grand fantasy Gothick house (with octagonial library), naturally there were ornamental walks past waterfalls, over rustic bridges, a lake, and a model dairy - Johnes was also an enthuastic agricultural improver and took various measures to try and 'improve' his tenant farmers and how they farmed the land, the soil was acidic, their tools primitive, the only ready fertilisers were the end product of grazing livestock and seaweed and in any case the tenants had barely any money - the cows, Pavord observes, in the model dairy lived better than the tenants. Inevitably frustrated by the tenants obstinate failure to better themselves Johnes decided to improve the people by importing first Scots and then planning on importing Swiss (a plan which came to nothing, there is still no Swiss exclave in the Welsh mountains). It was all a bit pointless, Pavord points out in the eighteenth century it was a hopelessly remote area, Johnes couldn't even get the cheeses made in his dairy to market, you could pour money into draining and enriching the soil but you'd never recover the investment given the transport cost of getting stuff to market. The timber from the trees she thinks alone might have been a viable cash crop - but they had all been planted to be pretty. The house was blown up in the 1950s to save on maintenance costs - this is the recommended course of action if you really don't like housework.
The next sections deals with the agricultural improvers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries like Arthur Young and William Cobbett whose Rural Rides features quite strongly, this deals with sheep breeding, enclosures, and land management. Cobbett like Constable (and Pavord) liked landscapes similar to the one that they grew up in. It's all mildly interesting, and somewhat conservative (with the smallest of 'c's') of the 'Ger off me land, and don't tell me what I can and can't do on it' type. Although she mentions that the Texel breed of sheep are migrants (on her travels she observes that a Texel ram is considerably more popular among the ewes than a pair of native rivals, the shepherd puts it down to his superior technique of not chasing ewes who are not interested ) she remains stiffly insular in her outlook - but the agricultural improvers were much inspired or influenced particularly by the measures developed in the Netherlands. The divergence in opinions on the landscapes is interesting the popular tourist destination of the Cotswolds appeared to Cobbett to be a horrifying desert, tree poor with agricultural labourers obliged to build little stone hovels by the roadside to squat in since the commons there had all been enclosed, she gives a sense of how for Cobbett the landscape could be read as an economic treatise telling you about the poverty or well being of the inhabitants without having to interview a single person.
She breaks in to a section on Dorset, picking up on some Dorset micro-histories and a chapter on Thomas Hardy (pp 192 -201) and particularly the "staggeringly ugly" (p.194) house called Max Gate that he built for himself, "In the end, we come to a shrine to pull a great person down to our less elevated level" (ibid) she says - she's in luck as she finds the pink mug he used for shaving to be uncommonly ugly too. In between she travels about herself, Norfolk bores her, but she is enraptured looking at waterfalls in the rain from her car in the west of Scotland, she thinks that the viewpoints of sweeping vistas recommended to tourists are about power, I think this was something of an under explored idea in the context of the book - it was all about power either in terms of capturing the imagination and forcing people to perceive the world in a certain way or through agricultural practises actually changing it. In a few words about her uncle's funeral she is lyrical about rootedness and community and what we loose by moving on - but of course she does not live in the Welsh borders were she grew up and where the farm that belonging to her grandparents is ringed by farms where her kin worked or married, she lives in Dorset.
The Hardy chapter was good - he grew up only a few miles away from Tolpuddle famous for its martyrs, his Wessex seems to have been built up of a few locations within walking distance of where he lived near Dorchester (Casterbridge). Pavord writes : "The landscape of the Wessex novels is the country of Hardy's grandparents. Hardy, living in a time of violent transition and rural depopulation, was looking back nostalgically to a time when order had seemed eternal (p.199). It is curious to time of Hardy's novels both as a Dreamtime of a mythical recent past and drawn from precise locations. She suggests there is something strange in the interest that Japanese tourists have for Hardy and the places associated with him but from how she describes him he sounds very similar to what I have read of some Meji era Japanese writers.
I think that is the issue with this book, it is a book that is felt and not thought and so ends up somewhat inconsistent and rambly - if it had been structured as a travelogue this would not have mattered but as it is, comes over as salad on ice cream served in a bowl of soup, interesting, even tasty in parts but somehow...
The title is not wrong. Landskipping. It is about the land, well the British land, and Anna Pavord's book skips about from how the landscape was regarded in culture in the eighteenth century, then it skips to the agricultural improvers who looked at the landscape in a completely different way to the painters, poets, and writers on aesthetics, another skip takes us into Dorset, little skips throughout the text takes us sideways in Pavord's childhood and her feelings towards and appreciation of certain (British) landscapes. In short it reminds me very much of Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory except entirely fixated on the British Isles and only ranging from the eighteenth century to the present.
In the first section of the book she takes in Gainsborough and Constable, there are two ideas here I think one is about valuing certain types of wild landscapes, the other is about appreciating landscapes like the one in which you grew up in. There was, Pavord says, a search for awe inspiring, wild and majestic landscapes in Britain, as a consequence of wars with France with blocked access to Italy and the Alps for young men on the Grand Tour - I liked this argument upon reading it but after some time I remembered a certain playful little book - A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy in which I recalled the narrator remembered half way across the channel that England and France were at war and he didn't have a passport - despite which he travels on to Paris and gets said document, then I recalled that even after the Revolution that Wordsworth went on a walking tour through France to Alpine regions, this also exposed one of the great weaknesses in the book - across Europe there was a movement from an interest in Italian or Alpine landscapes to local equivalents or alternatives, a slow movement across hundreds of years admittedly, but for what ever the cause it happened.
There is an overlap between this desire for the Romantic and the sublime in the landscape in her discussion of Thomas Johnes estate of Hafod in Cardiganshire in Wales (pp.78-90), much impressed by the potential in the mountains, hills and crags Johnes had over two million trees planted to provide suitably charming views for a grand fantasy Gothick house (with octagonial library), naturally there were ornamental walks past waterfalls, over rustic bridges, a lake, and a model dairy - Johnes was also an enthuastic agricultural improver and took various measures to try and 'improve' his tenant farmers and how they farmed the land, the soil was acidic, their tools primitive, the only ready fertilisers were the end product of grazing livestock and seaweed and in any case the tenants had barely any money - the cows, Pavord observes, in the model dairy lived better than the tenants. Inevitably frustrated by the tenants obstinate failure to better themselves Johnes decided to improve the people by importing first Scots and then planning on importing Swiss (a plan which came to nothing, there is still no Swiss exclave in the Welsh mountains). It was all a bit pointless, Pavord points out in the eighteenth century it was a hopelessly remote area, Johnes couldn't even get the cheeses made in his dairy to market, you could pour money into draining and enriching the soil but you'd never recover the investment given the transport cost of getting stuff to market. The timber from the trees she thinks alone might have been a viable cash crop - but they had all been planted to be pretty. The house was blown up in the 1950s to save on maintenance costs - this is the recommended course of action if you really don't like housework.
The next sections deals with the agricultural improvers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries like Arthur Young and William Cobbett whose Rural Rides features quite strongly, this deals with sheep breeding, enclosures, and land management. Cobbett like Constable (and Pavord) liked landscapes similar to the one that they grew up in. It's all mildly interesting, and somewhat conservative (with the smallest of 'c's') of the 'Ger off me land, and don't tell me what I can and can't do on it' type. Although she mentions that the Texel breed of sheep are migrants (on her travels she observes that a Texel ram is considerably more popular among the ewes than a pair of native rivals, the shepherd puts it down to his superior technique of not chasing ewes who are not interested ) she remains stiffly insular in her outlook - but the agricultural improvers were much inspired or influenced particularly by the measures developed in the Netherlands. The divergence in opinions on the landscapes is interesting the popular tourist destination of the Cotswolds appeared to Cobbett to be a horrifying desert, tree poor with agricultural labourers obliged to build little stone hovels by the roadside to squat in since the commons there had all been enclosed, she gives a sense of how for Cobbett the landscape could be read as an economic treatise telling you about the poverty or well being of the inhabitants without having to interview a single person.
She breaks in to a section on Dorset, picking up on some Dorset micro-histories and a chapter on Thomas Hardy (pp 192 -201) and particularly the "staggeringly ugly" (p.194) house called Max Gate that he built for himself, "In the end, we come to a shrine to pull a great person down to our less elevated level" (ibid) she says - she's in luck as she finds the pink mug he used for shaving to be uncommonly ugly too. In between she travels about herself, Norfolk bores her, but she is enraptured looking at waterfalls in the rain from her car in the west of Scotland, she thinks that the viewpoints of sweeping vistas recommended to tourists are about power, I think this was something of an under explored idea in the context of the book - it was all about power either in terms of capturing the imagination and forcing people to perceive the world in a certain way or through agricultural practises actually changing it. In a few words about her uncle's funeral she is lyrical about rootedness and community and what we loose by moving on - but of course she does not live in the Welsh borders were she grew up and where the farm that belonging to her grandparents is ringed by farms where her kin worked or married, she lives in Dorset.
The Hardy chapter was good - he grew up only a few miles away from Tolpuddle famous for its martyrs, his Wessex seems to have been built up of a few locations within walking distance of where he lived near Dorchester (Casterbridge). Pavord writes : "The landscape of the Wessex novels is the country of Hardy's grandparents. Hardy, living in a time of violent transition and rural depopulation, was looking back nostalgically to a time when order had seemed eternal (p.199). It is curious to time of Hardy's novels both as a Dreamtime of a mythical recent past and drawn from precise locations. She suggests there is something strange in the interest that Japanese tourists have for Hardy and the places associated with him but from how she describes him he sounds very similar to what I have read of some Meji era Japanese writers.
I think that is the issue with this book, it is a book that is felt and not thought and so ends up somewhat inconsistent and rambly - if it had been structured as a travelogue this would not have mattered but as it is, comes over as salad on ice cream served in a bowl of soup, interesting, even tasty in parts but somehow...
May 3, 2016
From the soft rolling hills of the chalk downs, the dramatic white cliffs, the wildness of the Scottish Highlands, the evocative hills and mountains of the Lakes and the long history of Wessex, Britain’s countryside has brought so much inspiration to artists and writers. These places have given us famous poems and paintings, but were also the source of inspiration for men who gave us tourism, a farming revolution and a sense of the picturesque.
In this book Pavord roams from coast to coast, valley to mountain following the people who travelled by foot and horseback to bring us captivating accounts of locations that became culturally significant and are nowadays instantly recognizable. We get a brief overview of artist such as Turner and Constable, the poetry of Wordsworth and the writings of Hardy. The men who transformed our countryside played no less a part; the quintessential image of rolling fields, bordered by hedges was bought about by the enclosure of land, and loss of the commons from the peasants. It is breathtakingly beautiful, but at what cost.
What Pavord writes about with most passion though, is her part of the world; West Dorset. It is a land of hill forts and water meadows, ancient coasts and timeless landscapes. In her exploration of the world outside her backdoor, she considers the struggle still for common land access for people, the delights and horrors of golf courses, coppices rooks and the animal that has moulded this landscape so much, the sheep. Another passion of hers is the spring and autumn light; in this part of the world it can be delightful, bringing out the contrast in the strip lynchets on the hills.
Pavord is an eloquent writer and for a lot of this book it shows. Her prose is captivating as she describes her patch. It is a shame, as she really has a grasp of the history of her part of Dorset and how it became what it is today. Pavord has a good grounding in the current issues that face rural communities in this modern age, to get the balance between accessibility and biodiversity whilst still maintaining the things that draw people to those locations. Good book overall, and in parts was really good, but I did feel that the book is let down by the section on art and artists. It feels that it was added after to fill it out which is a shame really.
In this book Pavord roams from coast to coast, valley to mountain following the people who travelled by foot and horseback to bring us captivating accounts of locations that became culturally significant and are nowadays instantly recognizable. We get a brief overview of artist such as Turner and Constable, the poetry of Wordsworth and the writings of Hardy. The men who transformed our countryside played no less a part; the quintessential image of rolling fields, bordered by hedges was bought about by the enclosure of land, and loss of the commons from the peasants. It is breathtakingly beautiful, but at what cost.
What Pavord writes about with most passion though, is her part of the world; West Dorset. It is a land of hill forts and water meadows, ancient coasts and timeless landscapes. In her exploration of the world outside her backdoor, she considers the struggle still for common land access for people, the delights and horrors of golf courses, coppices rooks and the animal that has moulded this landscape so much, the sheep. Another passion of hers is the spring and autumn light; in this part of the world it can be delightful, bringing out the contrast in the strip lynchets on the hills.
Pavord is an eloquent writer and for a lot of this book it shows. Her prose is captivating as she describes her patch. It is a shame, as she really has a grasp of the history of her part of Dorset and how it became what it is today. Pavord has a good grounding in the current issues that face rural communities in this modern age, to get the balance between accessibility and biodiversity whilst still maintaining the things that draw people to those locations. Good book overall, and in parts was really good, but I did feel that the book is let down by the section on art and artists. It feels that it was added after to fill it out which is a shame really.
February 15, 2016
I had high hopes for this book, but unfortunately I found it stodgy and more than a little dull in places.
Often repetitive and with far too many long quotes (which in the end just felt like padding). And wouldn't you think a book about landscape would be nicely illustrated? All we get are a few very small black and white pictures that I had to peer at.
The book only came alive when Pavord talked about her own experiences in the landscape.
I grew tired of lists of names and books written about the landscape, farming etc.
The book blurb calls Landskipping 'a ravishing celebration of landscape'. I beg to differ. Disappointing.
Often repetitive and with far too many long quotes (which in the end just felt like padding). And wouldn't you think a book about landscape would be nicely illustrated? All we get are a few very small black and white pictures that I had to peer at.
The book only came alive when Pavord talked about her own experiences in the landscape.
I grew tired of lists of names and books written about the landscape, farming etc.
The book blurb calls Landskipping 'a ravishing celebration of landscape'. I beg to differ. Disappointing.
January 6, 2023
I liked the idea behind this: an inquiry into how we respond to the landscape, from painters to farmers, throughout history, as well as a general love-letter to landscapes. However, its execution let it down. It lacks a clear structure and seems undecided whether to be a selection of eclectic essays on the topic or one cohesive book. Having just written that comment and reading a bit more about the author, I see some of the content is pretty much copy-pasted from news articles she wrote, which explains the patchy and disjointed feeling that suggests of separate essays. It comes across as a little disingenuous to not tell the reader that some of the content comes directly from her articles, as such books usually do. I also felt that to write a book on landscape but not to include a map showing the places she talks about seemed to be missing a trick.
I did like this quote though:
“This is why you can with pleasure come back and back and back to a landscape; it is never the same. It is at the same time unchanging and ephemeral, timeless yet particular.”
(As an aside, unrelated to the book in general, I’m intrigued how vehement the author feels in her distaste for Max Gate, the house Thomas Hardy designed for himself. I can’t say I love the place myself, but to me at worst it is just a nondescript Victorian house to which her scathing review comes across as rather strong. Some of her feelings on this seem to come from a general distaste of how organisations do interpretation in museums and nature reserves. And yes, her thoughts on this come from a news article of hers too.)
I did like this quote though:
“This is why you can with pleasure come back and back and back to a landscape; it is never the same. It is at the same time unchanging and ephemeral, timeless yet particular.”
(As an aside, unrelated to the book in general, I’m intrigued how vehement the author feels in her distaste for Max Gate, the house Thomas Hardy designed for himself. I can’t say I love the place myself, but to me at worst it is just a nondescript Victorian house to which her scathing review comes across as rather strong. Some of her feelings on this seem to come from a general distaste of how organisations do interpretation in museums and nature reserves. And yes, her thoughts on this come from a news article of hers too.)
June 25, 2019
Admittedly this is a rare DNF for me. I started off wanting to like it but no.
Other reviewers have said it very succinctly; erratic, disjointed, boring, swathes of quotes and pasted sections of other author's writing.
Nope, too many books and too little time.
Other reviewers have said it very succinctly; erratic, disjointed, boring, swathes of quotes and pasted sections of other author's writing.
Nope, too many books and too little time.
December 16, 2022
Pavord examines how landscape is seen through the eyes of artists and writers, those who work the land and those who live in or visit it. She also examines how attitudes toward landscape have changed over time. However, I felt that she examines too few people & locations to provide the broad overview that is needed for this topic. Only a handful of people are mentioned, and the areas of land that are covered are the ones that she knows and loves well herself. Totally understandable in a person appreciation/memoir, but that is not what this book claims to be. I also found it frustrating that a book which spends so much time talking about landscape pictures has so few illustrations. On several occasions, Pavord goes into great detail of the lessons we can learn from a particular picture, which is pretty meaningless if you are not able to view a representation of that picture!
She did make some valuable points about the way that humankind has influenced and altered our 'natural' landscape, and how much of the 'unspoiled' countryside we love so well is in face the result of thousands of years of human occupation. She writes well, if a trifle repetitively at times, and overall, this book was an enjoyable read, although not one I enjoyed enough to keep after reading. As a personal appreciation of the countryside close to her heart, it works fairly well. Just don't expect it to deal with the broad themes that are implied in the blurb!
She did make some valuable points about the way that humankind has influenced and altered our 'natural' landscape, and how much of the 'unspoiled' countryside we love so well is in face the result of thousands of years of human occupation. She writes well, if a trifle repetitively at times, and overall, this book was an enjoyable read, although not one I enjoyed enough to keep after reading. As a personal appreciation of the countryside close to her heart, it works fairly well. Just don't expect it to deal with the broad themes that are implied in the blurb!
August 5, 2018
The sheep on the cover of my edition should be a give-away. This book is as much concerned with the human effects (read farming) on landscape, as landscape itself, and makes that same point, sometimes somewhat irritably, throughout.
As others have pointed out, it's a disconnected and fragmented kind of book; I found Part One, 'Prospects and Painters', which looks at how landscape is seen in art through Gainsborough, Constable and the first tourists, much more interesting than 'Prospects and the Plough', which follows.
There is some nice writing, if you are interested in the topic, and the question 'why is it that some places call to us, give us sustenance, and others don't?', resonates.
What's less attractive is the increasingly strident ' I was brought up among farmers ...' kind of thing, and an almost anti-intellectual thread against information signs, for example, in favour of the authentic landscape, as experienced through a farming lens.
As others have pointed out, it's a disconnected and fragmented kind of book; I found Part One, 'Prospects and Painters', which looks at how landscape is seen in art through Gainsborough, Constable and the first tourists, much more interesting than 'Prospects and the Plough', which follows.
There is some nice writing, if you are interested in the topic, and the question 'why is it that some places call to us, give us sustenance, and others don't?', resonates.
What's less attractive is the increasingly strident ' I was brought up among farmers ...' kind of thing, and an almost anti-intellectual thread against information signs, for example, in favour of the authentic landscape, as experienced through a farming lens.
May 4, 2017
Well written, well researched and fascinating to read. From the perspective of her own relationship with landscape, beginning and ending with her mother and globe flowers in Herefordshire, Anna Pavord covers tourism, the picturesque, ways of travelling, areas of the UK, improvement and enclosure, Corbett, ownership and access.
For a book written in 2016, it is strange that environmental threats are not really included; she seems to feel that nature can survive. She is a little too intolerant of bureaucracy for y taste and thinks that communities can run on 'unwritten rules'.
However most of the book is just beautiful and full of engaging details about the land, words, history and culture of both sorts.
For a book written in 2016, it is strange that environmental threats are not really included; she seems to feel that nature can survive. She is a little too intolerant of bureaucracy for y taste and thinks that communities can run on 'unwritten rules'.
However most of the book is just beautiful and full of engaging details about the land, words, history and culture of both sorts.
January 10, 2017
I found this a bit disappointing. It felt like reading several books lumped together rather than one narrative. It was at its best when the author was considering her own relationship with places and more of this would have made a better book. As it was the section on painters didn't offer much in the way of new insight and the bits on farming have been done better elsewhere. There were some interesting case studies - eg Hafod in Wales which I found fascinating but there simply wasn't enough of these moments. Oh, and Thomas Hardy's first wife was called Emma. Little things.
May 5, 2019
Got a bit Brexitty about halfway through. Put me right off.
October 23, 2020
Landskipping is a history of the British relationship and attitudes towards landscape. It begins with changing attitudes in the 18th century towards the picturesque in landscape and takes in maps, access to the countryside, artistic approaches to dealing with scenery, local distinctiveness in landscapes, agricultural changes, landscape tourism and conflicts between agriculture, conservation and tourism.
Pavord offers insightful discussions about how much agriculture has shaped the British landscape and although I think she overvalues agriculture here it is a refreshing counterweight to the increasingly popular re-wildling attitude that agriculture is necessarily a bad thing for the landscape.
She also muses on the particularity of landscapes, the importance of local distinctiveness in architecture and field boundaries (which is being eroded all the time) and the way that different people are drawn to different landscapes:
'..when we leave our settled places to explore landscapes that are not our own, are we consciously looking for certain things? Or are we unconsciously imprinted ... with an idea of what a pleasing landscape should be?'
It's a thoughtful, beautifully written book, with some stunning descriptive passages:
'In early Spring, the colours on the hill are more dun, more fused together than they are in the Autumn. With the big trees in the gulleys bare of leaf, the hanging fringes of lichen on their branches, a strange sulphurous pale green-grey...'
As a resident of Scotland, and frequent visitor to the Highlands, I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the Scottish Highlands, with it's admiration for stormy weather, seeing rain as a 'wild, liberating catalyst.'
Well chosen examples of landscape art mark the beginning of each new chapter of this fascinating book, which is a great read for anyone interested in the British countryside.
Pavord offers insightful discussions about how much agriculture has shaped the British landscape and although I think she overvalues agriculture here it is a refreshing counterweight to the increasingly popular re-wildling attitude that agriculture is necessarily a bad thing for the landscape.
She also muses on the particularity of landscapes, the importance of local distinctiveness in architecture and field boundaries (which is being eroded all the time) and the way that different people are drawn to different landscapes:
'..when we leave our settled places to explore landscapes that are not our own, are we consciously looking for certain things? Or are we unconsciously imprinted ... with an idea of what a pleasing landscape should be?'
It's a thoughtful, beautifully written book, with some stunning descriptive passages:
'In early Spring, the colours on the hill are more dun, more fused together than they are in the Autumn. With the big trees in the gulleys bare of leaf, the hanging fringes of lichen on their branches, a strange sulphurous pale green-grey...'
As a resident of Scotland, and frequent visitor to the Highlands, I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the Scottish Highlands, with it's admiration for stormy weather, seeing rain as a 'wild, liberating catalyst.'
Well chosen examples of landscape art mark the beginning of each new chapter of this fascinating book, which is a great read for anyone interested in the British countryside.
April 16, 2020
There are good things in this book: the author writes well and immensely knowledge and passionate about the British countryside, but ultimately it doesn't cohere and is less than the sum of its parts. The first section deals with the emergence of the concept of landscape in the C18th, and the contrasting concepts of beauty, the sublime, and the picturesque, discussing painters including Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. The country here is a source of recreation, something to be enjoyed, and a delight to the soul. This is contrasted with the second section on agricultural improvement, where the country becomes an economic resource to be used to the maximum. However somewhat unexpectedly the author pulls back from a conclusion about how intensive agriculture has blighted the UK's landscape, as well as its native flora and fauna. Farmers did damaging things because they were responding to economic stimuli and government policy (which is a reasonable observation, but doesn't put right the wrongs). She then ends with a lyrical section on Dorset, highlighting with great insight how what we think of as a natural landscape is also the product of thousands of years of farming. What the book is trying to do, why it is really here is ultimately a puzzle.
August 24, 2020
I loved this book - really an extended essay on how we come to view our landscape. Are we like Cobbett who took such pleasure in the efficient management of the land, the delicate cultivation of soil for food. Or are we Romantic lovers of the untouched view? I finished reading this bursting with ideas about place and countryside.
May 6, 2021
This was a lovely book about landscape and reflection upon it. I liked her personal passages best and some of the Victorian history was a little on the dry side in comparison. I don’t know why they bothered with the badly reproduced B&W paintings as you could hardly make them out in my paperback version.
January 21, 2019
Beautifully written; a book full of vivid imagery that depicts the diversity of the English country side. Pavord shares, through personal stories and history, our inherent human natural desire to be close to the earth.
April 10, 2024
Some very interesting stories but in some way I didn't quite connect with this book; I had trouble getting a grip on what it was actually about. It may have just not been the right moment for me to have read it.
May 19, 2017
Pavord writes about the British countryside and what it means to the people who live there and the people who visit. I found interesting in parts and a bit of a drag in others.
April 11, 2020
Felt like the unifying thread could have been stronger. Strong desire to go to Scotland
Read
September 30, 2022A lovely gentle but fascinating read. A great way to find out more about places I love.
January 24, 2023
Very enjoyable, interesting and informative. Well researched and a different approach encompassing art, history and the natural world.
March 4, 2024
I gave up. My mum also gave up (that was how I got a copy). I think I picked it up expecting nature writing, and there is some of that, but Pavord does stray rather into the history of British art.
July 29, 2025
Possibly one of the most passionately written books I've read.
However it leads to mostly long slogs of reading woven with interesting passages.
However it leads to mostly long slogs of reading woven with interesting passages.
March 4, 2017
Great where it's good, dull where it's bad.
October 23, 2019
I found this book a little disappointing. It is an exploration of how people have interacted, changed and affected the British landscape over time. As a lover of the Lakes and other landscapes I knew to be covered I was anticipating this book with relish. Somehow it did not do it for me. Difficult to pinpoint why, I just think the writing just didn't hold be close enough.
August 15, 2017
Interesting & erudite. Split in halve. Part 1 is the artistic response to landscape - although I felt more on say Paul Nash from 20th century would have rounded it out. The other part is the impact humans have on landscape, where I did feel some points towards the end read like Tory nimbyism, but still interesting overall.
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