Guest review by Nick Manns: THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE by W G Hoskins

 

"Once you’ve spent time in Hoskins’ company, you start to interrogate a familiar world in a new way..."

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder and director of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester. 

The stump of an old windmill can be seen a couple of hundred metres from the A43, just outside Easton on the Hill in Northamptonshire. The mill is situated at a high point on the upland that looks down on the Welland valley and its sails would have been turned by winds coming from the west.

The relic is a mile or so north of RAF Wittering, which is marked by the rotating clam-shell radar dish at the end of the runway. The aerodrome, originally constructed for the Royal Flying Corps, dispensed with the acres of arable farmland that would have given the windmill its reason for existing.

This process of picking up signs in the landscape and reconstructing a past world is at the heart of Hoskins’ book. Published in 1955, it expanded the notion of ‘landscape’ from simply an idea of ‘nature’ to include how people have interacted with (and changed) the natural world. In the case of RAF Wittering, that change could have been more than simply retiring an old technology: a Valiant bomber accidentally dropped a thermo-nuclear device onto the runway in the late 1950s.

Hoskins came from a family of Exeter bakers but after studying economics at the University College of South West England, he became a lecturer in the subject at University College Leicester, subsequently Leicester University). His research into local history and articles on ancient farming, deserted medieval villages and so on led (in 1948) to his appointment as head of the newly formed Department of English Local History. He became convinced that visual evidence was vital to understanding the historical landscape.

In the preface to his study, Midland England (1949), he wrote:

‘… the whole of the English landscape is a manuscript written on again and again, a palimpsest with endless discoveries waiting to be made; and one can learn, with sufficient patience, skill and imagination, how to decipher this manuscript and make it yield its hidden meaning.’

The phrase, ‘one can learn’, is inclusive. People don’t have to be academics to ask questions and seek answers, however tentative. And although it might be tempting to rely on the internet to find answers to questions about localities, sometimes those localities raise their own questions.

For example, three miles below the nuclear near miss at Wittering lies the market town of Stamford. It’s small and compact and largely consists of 17th and 18th-century houses. They’re made from the local limestone, weathered to a honey colour. One of the interesting features about the town is the great width of some of the streets. One of them is called Broad Street, and another, Sheepmarket. The town layout, the width of the streets, reflects its medieval past as a major market for sheep and wool. Great herds of sheep would fill the town on market days.

These observations are entirely in keeping with Hoskins. At the end of his book, he writes: ‘towns …ought to be approached for the first time on foot. For only on foot does one detect the subtle rise and fall of ground to which the earliest settlers were so sensitive, or alignments in the town scene that may throw light on some fundamental change of plan: or the names of streets and lanes that set the mind working at once.’

The Making of the English Landscape is, in modern parlance, a ‘mash-up’: it combines different elements that are normally encountered separately. With-it French cultural theorists in the 1960s would have regarded it as a work of bricolage and that Hoskins was a bricoleur. A bricoleur, since you ask, is an odd-job person who uses whatever is at hand to complete a project. A project is usually a problem-solving exercise: why was this village built here? How old is it? Why is the church on the edge of the settlement?

Consequently, once you’ve spent time in Hoskins’ company, you start to interrogate a familiar world in a new way, the book working as a kind of exemplar. He’s at home when commenting on the use of hawthorn to demarcate fields; ruminating on the significance of place-names; considering the bits of pottery found in his back garden. And he’s not afraid to express sympathy for past calamities that would seem strange in the pages of a standard academic work. When reflecting on the many abandoned medieval villages across England, he notes that rural depopulation following the Black Death meant that it was more cost-effective for some landowners to switch from arable (and labour-intensive) farming to pastoral practices. Large, open fields could be parcelled up into smaller units and tenant farmers evicted. Hoskins writes:

‘The village houses were demolished – an easy business, for above their rubble foundations they mostly had mud walls – and men, women and children departed in tears to find a new livelihood elsewhere.’

Easton on the Hill is not a site of dereliction: a compact village of limestone houses that date from the 18th century. Hoskins writes that hill-top villages are ‘suggestive of great antiquity’ where height (working like radar) might allow the early identification of hostile forces, but the oldest buildings here are the Priest’s House (late 15th century) and the charming All Saints Church (12th century). The name, Easton is probably Anglo-Saxon (the ‘-ton’ suffix indicating farm or settlement). So, what attracted the early settlers?

All Saints Church, Easton on the Hill: Les Hull (WikiCommons)

Part of the answer can be found if you park just off the main road, south of the village. Hoskins had emphasised the desirability of walking as an aid to discovery and the wisdom of those words was immediately apparent on the day of my visit. There was a stiff westerly wind blowing across the upland, but Easton lies below the crest of the escarpment, on gradually sloping ground. It is largely sheltered from the elements.

The village is clustered around the junction of Church Street and High Street. There’s a war memorial there now, but it’s probably the site of the village green. The streets themselves are narrow, originally designed for the passage of farm carts. That world is evoked by the sign on one of the houses, The Old Forge.

Google Easton on the Hill and you’ll find it’s recorded in Domesday Book and that Romano-British objects were found in various digs. It’s therefore quite possible that Easton on the Hill replaced an earlier name.

So, what drew the various settlers to this (obviously) desirable site? There’s no clue on Wikipedia, but on the village map, Spring Close pocket park is identified. Walk there, to the very northern edge of the village, and you’ll discover a grassed area and a pond, surrounded by flag irises and ragged robin. A sign warns of Deep Water (and danger to children). Although inconspicuous, this is the spring that explains thousands of years of settlement: the omphalos of the community – the centre of their world.

Hoskins noted the importance of ‘patience, skill and imagination’ as qualities necessary to make sense of a landscape and he went on to say: ‘I am not much interested in surface impressions. The three visible dimensions of a building or landscape are not enough: they may entrance for the moment, but they make no abiding impression on the mind. One needs the fourth dimension of time to give depth to the scene: one wants to know as much as possible about the past life of a place, about its human associations, and to feel the long continuity of human life on that spot before it can make its full impression on the mind.’

The Making of the English Landscape is published by Little Toller Books.

Photographs by Nick Manns

More of Nick's choices:

The Antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand Positive Thinking, by Oliver Burkeman

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks

Billy No-Mates by Max Dickins

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

Guest review by Judith Allnatt: ENGLISH PASTORAL - AN INHERITANCE, by James Rebanks

"In a world trembling at the brink of climate disaster, this is both a timely and a hopeful book..."

Judith Allnatt writes short stories and novels for adults. Her novels have been variously shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature, the East Midlands Book Award and featured as a Radio 5 Live Book of the Month. Short stories have appeared in the Bridport Prize Anthology and the Commonwealth Short Story Awards, and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service.

Judith’s latest novel, The Silk Factory, is an eerie story of love and memory drawing on both the Luddite weavers’ rebellions in the nineteenth century and a modern day haunting. She has lectured widely on Creative Writing for over two decades and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She lives with her family in Northamptonshire and is working on her fifth novel. For more information and blog posts see Judith’s website.  Twitter: @judithallnatt

English Pastoral is both urgent in its call to arms for the planet and poetic in its lyrical description of life on the author’s farm in the Cumbrian fells.

The book is structured in three acts. The first concerns the traditional farming that he learnt from his grandfather: rotating crop and pasture, using manure to nourish the soil and harvesting once a year. These were the farming methods evolved over centuries that worked both with and for nature. Spilt grain helped birds survive through the winter and cutting hay once for fodder rather than frequent grass cutting for silage allowed a habitat to survive for ground nesting birds such as curlews.

The second act explains the pressures of a growing world population and the industrialisation of farming: the growing of monoculture crops and the widespread use of pesticides, literally weeding out biodiversity; the spiralling use of fertilizers on soil ever more compacted and degraded; the use of massive machines on huge fields stripped of ancient hedgerows. These are practices that work efficiently to maximise production, but this drive for ever-lower food prices leaves little room for wild things and the cost to the natural world and the climate goes largely unheeded.

The third act explores hope for the future - the equivalent of the ‘redemption’ frequently used at this point in the structure of fiction. It describes James Rebanks’ return to some traditional farming methods. He chooses Herdwick sheep for their hardiness to Cumbrian weather. Belted Galloway cattle are introduced that can stand wintering outside and don’t need to eat silage indoors. Thus at one stroke he removes both the need for multiple crops of monoculture grass and the practice of spreading the resulting slurry: an acidic form of muck that destroys soil quality rather than well-rotted manure, which builds it. 12,000 trees are planted on his land. With the help of the Eden Valley River Authority, river and beck are rerouted and transformed from straightened, dredged, draining channels to meandering curved watercourses, slowing their pace to help protect towns downstream that were previously devastated by floodwater from unprecedented levels of rain. As the river wanders, gravel is deposited and salmon and trout that need gravel shoals on which to spawn return. He documents the otters, hares and owls returning to his land, alongside the rare wildflowers in the meadows. He speaks with equal enthusiasm of micro-organisms and numbers of earthworms - indicators of healthy soil. And what of the curlews? Driven out during the years of losing their chicks to the harvester, they are starting to return along with the swallows and swifts that dive to snatch the flies above muck-nourished fields.

Hung along the narrative thread that follows the farm’s fortunes, are vignettes of farming life: sheep stranded on an island of grass in floodwater, his father’s manic delight in the five yearly gorse burning, a son’s pride in winning a silver shield for being ‘best tup handler’.

The book is beautifully written. Old phrases such as ‘leading in the hay’ are used naturally as a matter of course. (Surely an echo of the thousands of years preceding this mechanical age, when men led horse and cart from field to yard). The face of the fells, changing with weather, the hour and the season is brought alive by the close observation and choice images of the writer.

In a world trembling at the brink of climate disaster, this is both a timely and a hopeful book. James Rebanks demonstrates that his farm is now not just carbon neutral but carbon positive – it is storing more carbon than it creates. Whilst pragmatically recognising that chemical intervention has its place, he makes the case for using traditional methods wherever possible and for encouraging and cherishing farming that improves the land and stewards the wildlife upon it. He points out that big corporations hunt in rural corners for genes in stock or crops in order to breed animals and plants capable of surviving new challenges such as climate changes. Yet, with every small farmer swallowed up by large scale monoculture farming these opportunities narrow and treasure is lost.

Most of us live in towns and cities and have little close contact with the land that feeds us. We buy packaged food from supermarkets and don’t think much about where it comes from or how it is produced. This book turns our eyes in this unwonted direction. What we see is that we can’t afford to ignore issues of regeneration and stewardship any longer, and that what happens to our land has far-ranging consequences for what will happen to our planet.

English Pastoral is published by Penguin.

See also: Wilding, by Isabella Tree, reviewed by Linda Newbery   

Guest review by Andrew Fusek Peters: CORDUROY by Adrian Bell

Andrew Fusek Peters is a poet, author and conservation photographer. His poems have been recordeded for the Poetry Archive. His books include Dip, Wilderland and Upland. See more on his website. 


I am currently re-reading Corduroy after a four-year gap. This time, I am using it as my country meditation before bed – sometimes ploughing through only a few pages before my heart sinks into a peaceful ease. This edition is a Slightly Foxed re-release of a classic nature writing adventure first published in 1930. The author, Adrian Bell (father of Martin) seemed to have two yearnings when young. He wanted to be a writer and, as a Londoner, he also wanted to escape the city ‘flying from the threat of an office life’ to delve deeply into the countryside of his dreams.

As an author and nature writer who left London at eighteen and finally married a Shropshire lass, it could be said I identify slightly! John Clare and to an extent Edward Thomas immersed themselves deeply in hill, field and forest. Theirs is the poetry of the insider looking out, so at one with nature that sometimes it is hard to separate the poet from the landscape. But Adrian Bell brought something different to the table. He was keenly aware from the get-go of his outsider-ness, his difference, his outdoor city boots sniffed at by his host Mr Colville, knowing that London leather will only survive a short while through the farming calendar.

Adrian pleaded with his father that his life ‘should be something in the open air’ - be careful what you pray for. As a paying guest, he began an utterly new life on the Colville farm. Even at that first meal of boiled batter pudding and roast pheasants, when contentment strikes it is tempered by ‘seeing myself in the wide looking-glass of the sideboard’ where he was not ‘large and rosy like the rest’ but ‘pale and thin, sitting like a ghost among them’.

This could have been an inauspicious start. The middle-class Londoner is properly a fish out of water. But Adrian had three great assets on his side – a wonderful thirst to learn alongside the willingness to work to a totally different timetable from the dawdling hours in suburban drawing rooms, and lastly, an attitude of respect for the people that still come to life in these pages. He did not play the outsider as a role, it was simply that the A-Z of farming life needed careful study, to which he applied himself henceforth, and on and off for the rest of his life.

Adrian was changed utterly by his experience. When he returned to town he ‘re-entered a world of nervous significances, where the very furniture was a complex language’. To his former friends, he is an amuse-bouche - or as he put it ‘a character part.’ Yet it is his willingness to embrace difference, to play his part as visitor or urban refugee that warms the text through and through.

‘Children gathered here also, and gazed upon the wonder of the fire, awed into silence as the sparks flew high, and an occasional passer-by paused and warmed his hands, exchanging some item of local news with the blacksmith. For in winter, the forge was a meeting-place second only to the inn, I discovered.

"I suppose these have made a difference to your trade," I said as a motor went by.

"Yes, they don’t need the kind of shoes I make," he replied. "There’s no hackneys kept today, no carriage horses; that’s how we’re hit…"'

This is the role Adrian played best, moving beyond mere nostalgia to a lament of modernisation. The book is full of tales of ancient squires and the last miller who worked the windmill, greasing the gears with tallow candles. By 1920, the world of humans was already in flux. One war over, another to begin, where it was known that many soldiers took Corduroy with them to remind them of the life left behind.

And I too catch glimpses in my second life as a conservation photographer, gradually getting to know some of the farmers and walking their land – being invited in for tea and biccies while we discuss curlews and the rare sightings of the leucistic white kite. Adrian is a good role model in his affection for the land and its people. He is a chronicler of a different age now falling into second hand echoes. My wife’s grandmother, when she was alive, told me how she remembered the coming of electricity to the Forest of Dean at the same time this book was written, when there were still carriages drawn by horse.

I leave Adrian, who went on to write twenty further books on the countryside, with the last word:

‘I had this pleasure of catching in the cloistral gloom of cowshed or stable those gleam-lit attitudes of strength and patience which the old painters turned into religious masterpieces.’

Corduroy is published by Faber.