Contributors

Guy Edwardes

Marshwood Vale. Photo: © Guy Edwardes

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Richard Benson on rural sensuality

… the fragrance of peas harvested on a summer evening; the foot-feel of frozen mud ruts under your boots on an early January morning and the keening of a invisible light aircraft, pleasant because it points up the silence.

 

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Bill Bryson
Four qualities in particular, I think, set English icons apart and make them more memorable, more individual, vastly more noteworthy than icons elsewhere. Foremost among these is the ability – so gloriously evinced in the seaside pier – to be magnificent while having no evident purpose at all.

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Wendy Cope on water meadows

Winchester water meadows. Photo: © CPRE/Brabbs

When I first moved to Winchester in 1994 and began walking in the water meadows several times a week, I felt as if I had come home to an England I had always loved. That it felt like a homecoming made no sense because I had lived in the London suburbs during my childhood and for most of my life. Perhaps what I came home to was a vision of the perfect English landscape, glimpsed in films and on rural excursions. Here, right on my doorstep, was a landscape that lived up to the vision.

Photo: © Caroline Forbes

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 Nicholas Crane on the Norfolk Broads
Today, this wetland moves me way beyond the reckonings of an amphibious boyhood.  Every time I haul the mainsail, I know that the wind will carry our boat into a place where water and land are in a state of precarious balance. This is England’s most impermanent landscape, preserved by pumps and dykes, which cannot keep pace with the rising waters.

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Tom Mackie

Norfolk Windmills. Photo: © Tom Mackie

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Sebastian Faulks on pub signs
People who think of England as a practical country with little flair for the visual would never have imagined that its lanes and roads would be regularly punctuated by what look like cards from a wooden tarot pack – optical extravagances, creakily offering delight, escape and risk. But it is so; and sometimes we hardly see the strangest things by which we are surrounded.

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Andrew Marr on lines
There are the lines of copses, cut neatly around just where the tilt of the field means the combine harvester can’t clutch – leaving upended pudding bowls of beech of ash across the south. There are the harvest lines themselves, parallel machine trails of darker brown on silvery gold; the energetic thrust-lines of old industrial canals, and the lines of Victorian and Edwardian railways – bold, hacked lines made by Irish labourers, many of which are now as grassed and quiet as Neolithic barrows.

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Satish Kumar on Dartmoor
Dartmoor is my temple and my church – a glorious cathedral of nature – that is millions of years old. It was formed by the powers of geological time and the generosity of nature. I come here for the breath of fresh air; the smell of wet grass; the coolness of water and the purity of rocks.

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Michael Palin on crags

Derbyshire crag. Photo: © CPRE/Brabbs

Somewhere, not far from my home, where nature still rules, a young boy could have great dreams. He could see, in their pristine state, the valleys and river that had driven the mills and the forges that had made Sheffield famous. The very word for this place was evocative of something strong and uncompromising – like Sheffielders themselves: crags.

Photo: © Basil Pao

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Lucy Seigle on Totnes Castle
Unlike Glastonbury Tor – where, in order to get the full effect, you have to use your imagination to envision the plains below flooded – Totnes has no such pretensions. It is the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) of the castle community.

 

 

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Sir Roy Strong

Shaft of light. Photo: © CPRE/Robinson

Nature has a great way of using light and shade to turn a countryside scene into a work of art. These natural tools give the landscape its depth – establishing foreground and distance – and accentuate the geometry imposed by cultivation. And, because all of this is in a perpetual state of flux from one day to the next, the masterpiece is never the same.

 

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Chris Watson
Listen to sound recordist Chris Watson’s ‘own private chorus that transforms the darkness into light’.
> Listen (2.1MB MP3)

 

 

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Helen Dixon

Lighthouses. Photo: © Helen Dixon

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