A fine outlook

"Now there's a fine outlook...." So one of my fellow campers greeted me yesterday evening after we both had spotted a particularly shadowy cornfield reflecting the golden, evening sunlight, and made a bee-line towards it, SLRs at the ready.

Camped out in the Welsh Marches 

It struck me right then, many aspects of our national culture may be in decline: England may have recently exited The World Cup at the earliest opportunity, our entire water industry may be owned by the French, and Knightsbridge may have been annexed by the United Arab Emirates, however, in the field of landscape appreciation we still reign supreme. This is not surprising really since it was the English who developed looking at a view as, if not exactly an art form, then certainly a specific past-time for people of taste and discernment.

Inspired by writers like Uvedale Price and William Gilpin, in the late eighteenth century the leisured classes of England spilled out from their country estates and fashionable town-houses to seek out the picturesque within the living landscape. As early as 1814, William Wordsworth wrote of his fear that 'the Lakes will fall entirely into the possessioin of Gentry, either strangers or natives' and called for the Lakes to be deemed 'a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to percieve and a heart to enjoy'. Each succeeding generation has been convinced that the historical character of our landscape is under imminent threat of destruction. Phillip Larkin wrote in 1972 -

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won’t be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

It was not gentrification that Larkin feared, but mass car ownership and the disturbing notion of the working classes escaping the confines of the council estate and spoiling the nice view!

Yet the catastrophe has never quite unfolded in the way these writers imagined. Yes, swathes of England have succumbed to shopping malls and agro-business, but in such a crowded island supporting nine times the population of Wordsworth's time, the landscape, settlement and road patterns recorded in Domesday can still be discerned, if you care to look. Seen in those terms, it is a miracle that so much has survived.

The last few hours have produced two recognisably 'picturesque' moments. The first, a walk on the Shropshire, Powys border, up a little used right of way that cut across a field of ripe rye which rippled in the wind. At the top of a low rise, next to a coppice the path petered out. From the hill's shoulder you could trace the line of Offa's Dyke across the later field pattern and scattered farmsteads.

The second moment of landscape serendipity came at lunchtime today. We stopped in a small lay-by on a B road in the hills above Dolgellau. A footpath was signed from it following the aptly named 'Torrent Walk'. The path followst the Afon Clwedoc a down a wooded ravine. The stream tumbled over waterfalls large and small, through a chaos of mossy rocks. The sun cast a patchwork of shadows and poured golden-green.through the canopy of leaves It was utterly delightful. I suppose we must have.walked about three miles or so. It was utterly peaceful and we were entirely alone.

I said both walks were a product of serendipity, but that is not entirely the case. Each needed a modicum of map reading skills to spot likely good walks on the OS map - Gill is hawk-eyed in that respect. Do younger people still pop a map in their bag these days? Or has everyone reverted to being sat-nav dependent, or locked into following GPS instructions on a smart-phone? The biggest threat to the landscape is not global-warming or wholesale economic development but the chance that we simply stop looking at it, and appreciating the natural world on our doorstep by going for a walk. Maybe in the future what is on-screen will be far more alluring than what is around the corner. But not yet. We must not dismiss the picturesque as mere Romantic sentimentalism. It may yet curb our urge to become so self absorbed that we fail to notice the destruction of our own habitat.

So, yes my fellow camper was right, it was a fine outlook, and long may we remember to stop and look at it.