Monday 19 September 2011

My tamed landscape



 My camera's just broken so I finally downloaded the photos on my phone, to see what's been hiding in there. I'd forgotten about this sequence of pictures, taken on a walk in the wood on the hill behind my village. I saw no one - I walk there all the time and rarely do meet anyone - but there was no escaping the fact that people were all around.

I saw balloons, polystyrene cups, iron fences absorbed by trees, paint marks on the plantation trees, the trees themselves planted in regimented rows up the slope, a pump housing and water pipes, the back of a wooden sign ... It's a reminder of how interfered with our landscape is, how un-wild.

Is there a square inch of earth here in the Weald that no one has ever seen? I doubt it - people have lived here at least since the iron age, and even the empty places now were once settlements, fields and hunting grounds. I've never lived anywhere where people haven't made their mark on the land. It feels very safe. I wonder how I'd feel in a landscape where no one has yet walked.





2 comments:

  1. Brilliant pictures! I love the idea of going for a walk in a landscape that no one else has ever seen.

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  2. Round here even the empty places have a human history. We're just below the Ashdown Forest (where Pooh lives), which is wide and open and you might feel that there are spaces between tree roots, and pebbles in stream beds no one has seen. But all over the Forest there are buried iron age hill forts and Roman roads, and it's wide and open because we cut the trees down, so even there the landscape was created by us. Or at least its surface was.

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