It’s not long since there was derision in many quarters that the Olympics ceremony should draw on our ‘green and pleasant land’: how old-fashioned, how twee, how backward.īut perceptions are remoulded as the years pass. Generally we’re told that this vision exists only in our imagination. Since the Industrial Revolution our national consciousness has bred art and writing attempting to capture the essence of the countryside. I can, however, walk out on the moor and see the sheep, see the ponies, think of how many were recorded as neglected and emaciated earlier this year. There will be a huge hyper-real screen, the key point of interaction for the now and future, unless you disconnect, edit your life and put a shepherd in your garden like Marie Antoinette. You would barely hear a dog bark from next door, and yet I can hear incessant bombing from an Xbox, and when they’re not obliterating war-torn cities, it’s Formula 1 racing. I’m typing this in a cottage with walls eighteen inches thick. Some passing things might be rescued in the only way our age seems capable of doing – over-analysing, creating niches to attract like minds and consolidate exactly what it is we want to perpetuate: unaltered landscapes, timeworn buildings, to preserve an ancient thread over centuries and keep in check our ability to modify and obliterate within a few minutes.īut we cannot picture ‘the countryside’ as existing outside the trends of our century. And it’s different for each generation what is still beautiful to a 20-year-old today might be wrecked in the eyes of someone who knew it decades ago. The realisation comes through a growing susceptibility to pain at seeing it fade and become unfamiliar. It’s not something we might acknowledge until there are some years behind us. Whatever our experience of nature and landscape, it becomes part of us. In 1980, en route from the New Forest to Devon, through Tolpuddle and Dorchester, you could still imagine Thomas Hardy’s heart fluttering past the cottages, the window-frames layered with paint from his lifetime. As an eight-year-old member of his Otter Trust my heart stopped at the line in the newsletter: ‘It’s time to renew your subscription – don’t let the otters go hungry!’ Otters were my favourite animal – Philip Wayre’s The River People was rarely left in the local library. I took anything by BB (Denys Watkins Pitchford), author of Brendon Chase and Bill Badger. (Nothing was as fascinating as the beetle who had crawled into the pages and been reproduced in the facsimile.) One day a supply teacher entranced our class of six-year-olds with Edith Holden’s Country Diary. On reading After London: Wild England, William Morris made these dark comments: “I have no more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of civilisations: which I know now is doomed to destruction, probably before very long – what a joy it is to think of! And how it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world and real feelings and passions taking the place of our wretched hypocrises”.Įarlier, I had inherited Enid Blyton’s Country Walks with Uncle Merry from my brothers (I doubt Uncle Merry would pass many checks these days).
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