Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places - Anna Pavord

Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places - Anna Pavord

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  Whilst being very useful and informative, it is an easy and pleasurable read; as the Daily Telegraph says 'Written by a scholar, reads like a thriller.  Pavord writes for the independent and has done since its launch in 1986.  She writes and presents programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4 and has served on the Gardens Panel for the National Trust.  The book is a celebration of landscape and explores our relationship with it through the ages.  As well as describing her personal experiences of and response to the land she has divided the book into three main sections: Prospects and Painters, Prospects and the Plough and Prospects and Places. 

In the first section she examines how painters and artists have responded to the land over the years.  She covers some familiar ground with her discussions of the Picturesque and Sublime and their representation with particular reference to such as William Gilpin and Claude Lorraine with his 'Claude Glass' and Edmund Burke.  She also looks at how poets and writers related to the land, especially William Wordsworth.  Like many, she is critical of Gilpin and refers to his comment that 'Nature requires a helping hand' which he gave in his paintings where the view was often altered to fit his stringent rules for the picturesque.  On the Claude Glass she says that a view didn't exist until it had been mediated (by looking at it through the glass with the viewer's back to the scene).  The Claude Glass she says 'corrected' the landscape.  She is critical of 'landscape tourism', not just from Gilpin's day but from today with our 'brown signs' and viewpoints marked on maps.  She argues that we are still being told what view to look at and how to look at it.  Even a large proportion of photographers plant their tripods in the marks of those who have gone before.  I was interested when she feels that 'of all the places in our shrinking islands that can still deliver that sense of the sublime that Burke wrote about, for me is Wester Ross' and, further, 'For the sublime, you need go no further than the Applecross Peninsular and look west to the five planes of alternating darkness and light  towards the Cuillin Mountains of Skye'.  A view I have both enjoyed and photographed.

In the second part of her book she moves her attention from recorders of the landscape to those who have worked in and shaped it.  She describes how, ever since the Neolithic, man has shaped, changed and altered the land, making it it a place in which to live and feed himself.  She argues that it is a fallacy that our landscape is an entirely natural phenomenon and that even as far back as Domesday, only 20% of the country was covered in wild wood.  It did not look as it does today, but nor was it natural.  She writes about the government's Board of Agriculture set up in 1794 and those who reported back to it such as Arthur Young who published his commentaries on the state of agricultural England at the same time that William Gilpin was touring the River Wye.  She writes of William Cobbett who also reported to the Board and liked to travel slowly.  He said that 'Speed diminishes the gifts that a Journey can give you...' and 'I want to slow down the whole process, stay in touch with moving over the landscape'.  This is my view entirely and part of my inspiration for walking home from Lincoln Cathedral via the Witham Valley Abbeys.

In the final part of the book she writes about what landscape means to her and describes Dorset where she lives now and returns to her childhood landscape, where the book began: the area of South Wales near the Sugar Loaf.  She describes her walks and bemoans the plethora of brown tourists signs and notice boards arguing that 'There seems to be rather little that we are allowed to discover now, without some notice board looming up and telling us how to look, how to decode.  Interpretation of this kind is death to a natural landscape'.  Again she promotes walking as a way to discover the land '....for these messages to be heard you need to be on foot, not hurtling round the Tess (of the D'Urbervilles) trail notching off landmarks in your car'.  I was interested when she point out the OED definition of landscape: a view or prospect of natural scenery.  Natural seems to exclude any man altered land - is this not landscape too?  I liked one of her concluding remarks that 'Time is stitched into a landscape, but time is measured by different kinds of clock: geologic, historical, seasonal and diurnal'.  A fact which neatly reinforces my inspiration for experimenting with ICMs.