The beautiful game lives on in Ultima Thule

I'm very much an ex football fan, jaded and disillusioned by the ridiculous grandiloquence of the professional game.

However, in remotest Ultima Thule, it seems there is a true venue for the beautiful game.

This is the home ground of ÍB Vestmannaeyja, a football team based on the island of Heimaey off the south coast of Iceland. Photograph from http://groundhopping.se

Landscape in particular 6: Harberton, Devon and Tierra del Fuego

Several years ago my partner Lisa and I spent a month criss-crossing the towering wonder of the Andes of Chile and Argentina; a Patagonian odyssey of the sublime and the superlative. In the midst of all this epic-ness my memory reserves a special place for an altogether more temperate landscape, that of Harberton in Argentinian Tierra del Fuego. This tiny settlement and gentle farm-scape occupies a narrow peninsula that nudges into the cold, wind-whipped Beagle Channel; a plain-speaking and modest interloper amidst the drama of the world's southern-most settled terrain. Head south and Cape Horn and Antarctica await. 

Harberton is the oldest estancia (rural estate or ranch) in Tierra del Fuego, established as a sheep farm by an English misionary from Bristol, Thomas Bridges, in 1886. This was a period when the vast lands of Patagonia were opened up to sheep farmers from England and Scotland to become, for a time, one of the largest wool producing regions in the world. The settlement is named after the Devon home village of Bridges wife Mary ('Farmstead on the river Harbourne', an Old English river name meaning 'pleasant stream'). The distinctive white corrugated iron, red roofed farmstead that still stands today was prefabricated by Mary's father in England, shipped over and assembled at a sheltered spot chosen by indigenous Indians of the local Yamana tribe. With an empathy unusual for the time, Bridges devoted the last 30 years of his life to living amongst the Yamana people and compiling a dictionary of their language, with a sideline in rescuing shipwreck survivors, and was granted the land at Harberton by President Roca in recognition of his work.

Intrigued by the guidebook description, we took a bus trip from the provisional capital of Ushuaia; a tedious and interminable drive on a poorly maintained side road from the main highway. Released from the stuffiness of the bus we found ourselves, after weeks of Andean terra incognita, in a strangely familiar place. Bruce Chatwin also visited, and described this discovery of the known in his classic In Patagonia:

"Coming into Harberton from the land side, you could mistake it for a big estate in the Scottish Highlands, with its steep fences, sturdy gates and peat-brown trout streams. The Rev Thomas Bridge's settlement was strung out along the west shore of Harberton Inlet, shielded from the gales by a low hill ... The house, imported long ago from England, was of corrugated iron, painted white, with green windows and a soft red roof ... The flowers of an English garden seemed to glow with an inner brilliance. A path led through a wicket gate arched with a whale jaw. Woodsmoke drifted over the black water, on the far shore, geese were calling."  

And this is exactly the scene that we found. A serene piece of England transported to the far end of the earth; a National Trust tea room would not have been out of place amongst the well kept shrubs and cottage garden borders. South America seems to specialise in this type of liminality; isolated remnants of transplanted northern European material and psychological culture incorporated into the predominant and home-grown Latin American hegemony: German style houses throughout rural Chile; Welsh enclaves in Patagonia; English country clubs and polo in the prosperous hinterlands of Buenos Aires; the Falklands, a Hebridean outlier garrisoned by red, white and blue. 

Approaching the farmhouse we observed a tall, slim man, white haired and bearded, in denim dungarees. Visually he was as familiar as the English buildings and landscape around him, but he was in conversation in the easy Spanish of a native speaker. This I took to be Thomas Goodall, the great grandson of the founder of the farm, who still works the land today. In his cultural history of Patagonia, and spefically in relation to the old sheep rearing areas, Chris Moss observes that "Englishness has been preserved in people's faces, and in surnames". We then spent several slow hours wandering the lush greeness of the peninsula, the land meshed together by sheep folds and enclosures of wood and stone, accompanied by a warming breeze and ever-present bird song. The distant views seawards and southwards to the harsh mountains of Chile's Isla Navarino seemed, and not just administratively, to occupy another country; sentinals of malevolence biding their time, like circling behemoths.

Thomas Bridge's son, Lucas, 'went native' amongst the Yamana and used Harberton as a refuge for the dwindling numbers of indigenous speakers during the aggressive colonialism of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Argentina. He wrote a thrillingly titled memoir Uttermost Part of the Earth (1947) that I would love to find a copy of; perhaps to read on a visit to the soft green hills of Harberton, south of Totnes in deep England, busy and prosperous in the fifteenth century but now a quiet backwater, and be transported again to this facsimile dreamscape in the 'land of fire', 8,000 miles distant.

This is the latest in a regular-occasional series of posts on specific landscapes and places that are particularly meaningful to me, for whatever reason; after all, interest in the topographical is nothing without a feeling for sense of place: genius loci.

Previous 'Landscape in particular' posts: 

Hergest Ridge

Worth Valley

Cold Ashton

Kenilworth Castle
Bolton Abbey

References

Blacksell, Sophie (Ed.), 2005 Footprint Patagonia Bath: Footprint.

Chatwin, Bruce, 2005 In Patagonia London: Vintage.

Hoskins, W.G., 1971 Old Devon London: Pan Books.

Mills, A.D., 1995 A Dictionary of English Place-names Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moss, Chris, 2008 Patagonia: A Cultural History Oxford: Signal.

The landscape that Thatcherism created

"Where there is harmony, may we bring discord. Where there is truth, may we bring error. Where there is faith, may we bring doubt. And where there is hope, may we bring despair."

"I see no joy, I see only sorrow; I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow; so stand down Margaret, stand down please, stand down Margaret".

A last blast of winter: 'Come see the north wind's masonry'

Seen from afar, the ridge of the Black Mountains was a bright white saddle-back; we expected snow, but not the 'merciless whiteness' we encountered as we parked short of the car park, our way cut off by a drifting blockade.

Up we trudged to the Cat's Back ridge with a view down to the forsaken Olchon valley, the boundaries of its ancient fieldscape and intake from the moorland waste shown in sharp relief by the monotone white.

As the sun broke through we passed a group of mountain ponies, hardened to the harshness of the wind and unselfconsciously at home in this extreme citadel. Once on the level, bestriding the slopes of the narrow ridge we were in our own personal Cordillera Blanca, the drifting snow several feet deep and sculptured with impossible vibrancy by the wind; a sight captured by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his poem, The Snowstorm: "Come see the north wind's masonry...the frolic architecture of the snow".

We pressed on to the trig point at the high point of Black Hill. Until now we had been but two of numerous pairs of footprints in the snow. Northwards from the trig point, however, we had few antecedents. The path itself was buried beneath the depths and, as Robert Macfarlane observes, "snow is the disguise artist of the mountains". However, visibility was good and the head of the valley to which we were aiming was in clear sight. So we followed the line of a pair of footprints, deep holes punched into "the great silence of snow" (Snow, Edward Thomas). 

The going was heavy but blasts of sunlight kept our spirits up, a reminder of the magical other worldliness of our surroundings. Nan Shepherd's epistle on the upland topography of the Cairngorms gets it right: "Loose snow blown in the sun looks like the ripples running through corn".

Our forebears had forsaken the ridge line and headed straight down the steepling slope, their footprints converging far below with the ghost of the footpath in the valley bottom. And so we followed in their tracks, a route that would be cruel to ankles and knees in normal conditions but given unexpected legitimacy by several inches of snow. Now back at low level, in the secret vastness of the upper Olchon valley, there was no let-up in the depth of the snow; we were though edging towards normality, our stinging shins and etched memories accompanying us homewards, renewed: 

"And through the snow our fallen world's reborn

And I a child again, born of this night"

(Een Geur van Hoger Honig, Martinus Nijhloff). 

References

Cotter, Gerry (Ed.), 1988 Natural History Verse: An anthology London: Christopher Helm.

Davidson, Peter, 2005 The Idea of North London: Reaktion.

Macfarlane, Robert, 2003 Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination London: Granta.

Shepherd, Nan, 2011 The Living Mountain Edinburgh: Canongate. 

Derek Jarman - A Journey to Avebury

A Journey to Avebury - an early Derek Jarman Super 8 film from 1971 (via You Tube). Another addition to the hippy-pagan-folk landscape aesthetic of the time, complementing the contemporary The Children of the Stones/ The Owl Service/ Penda's Fen oeuvre. With a nicely judged soundtrack by Curve, though I think John Martyn's Small Hours would fit even better.

Thanks to the web site of the fantastic Little Toller Books for alerting me to this video.

Conflicting narratives of a landscape past and present

Below are two images that appear to be starkly different; one in a bucolic setting, the other concrete and urban. They are in fact the same location: Stapleton Bridge at the bottom of Bell Hill, borderland between the village suburb of Stapleton on the north-eastern edge of Bristol and the grittier environs of Easton and Baptist Mill further into the cityscape.

This is a topographical snapshot through which I pass on a regular basis and one which demonstrates the complex entanglement of emotions, memories, perceptions and debate that landscape engenders. In discussing the relationship between landscape and Englishness David Matless asserts that "if landscape carries an unseemly spatiality, it also shuttles through temporal processes of history and memory. Judgements over present value work in relation to narratives of past landscape".

The first image, a postcard photograph taken in the early twentieth century (from the Tempus Images of England: Stapleton volume) has all the elements required to conjure up feelings of wistful nostalgia for times past: the sunny black and whiteness, a ford gently sloping to a rocky river, the luxuriant trees and distant cottage. The setting populated by a group of children, a horse and a charabanc. All harmonious and timeless, everything in its right place. Never mind that such scenes were often stage-managed or that the juggernaut of suburbanisation was rapidly approaching, this is how we want Old England to be represented in our imagination; and sits well with a popular strain of elegiac gloom, tapped into by Philip Larkin in his poem Going, Going: 

"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."

The second image, taken last summer and on my cycle route from home to work, is an equally interesting view of the same spot. But all is now changed, the only constant in the century or so between the photographs is the river Frome. The handsome arched stone bridge replaced by the straight-line utilitarianism of its 1930's successor - no doubt seen as shiny and modern at the time, but now drab and anonymous - and the ford no more. Most dramatically, the flyover carrying the M32 motorway into the heart of the city stomps over the ground-level topography like an unstoppable and disregarding lava flow of concrete; physically connected to its surroundings by its supporting pillars, but wholly dismissive of the reluctantly subterranean world cowering beneath. The bare, infertile earth in the foreground emphasising the malignant impact of this early 1970's addition; part of a wider contemporary malaise that Keith Brace articulates in his 1971 Portrait of Bristol: "I believe that Bristol is at a point of crisis in its history and that the modest-sized, relaxed, intimate city we have known is all too likely to become a disproportionately large provisional metropolis, resembling all other provisional metropolises of the future in clinical impersonality".    

Undeniably this kind of motor-city infrastructure, conceived on a drawing-board - the product of a late twentieth-century narrowly focused technocratic imagination - unsettles the balance of the existing landscape through which it courses. The benefits that it provides - harder, faster, stronger communications links between city and hinterland - are disputable and, in any case, locally irrelevant compared to what it takes away not only in terms of pollution but also aesthetically and spiritually.

But linger and look, and all is not lost. Move under the flyover and, on the right day, a sunlit vista of the neighbouring Bridge Farm opens up, framed by greenery. This eighteenth century agricultural relic (seen opposite and in the old photograph below, also taken from Images of England: Stapleton) occupies a visually stimulating juxtaposition with the modernity of the airborne motorway just metres away. A pleasing reminder that this area plays fast and loose with simplistic notions of zonal separation between urban, suburban and rural: all three rub together here. And we can begin to chip away at the, in Matthew Johnson's words, "unrestrained empiricism" of the Romantic view of landscape as a purely visual and aesthetic phenomena.  

Looking in the opposite direction there is a certain grace to the curving slip road, descending along the edge of the defiant greenery of Eastville Park; a pleasing contrast of light and shade. The paved non-space below the road has become here an arena for a variety of unofficial activities: unseen daily depositors of vast amounts of bread crumbs for pigeons, a troupe engaged in fire-eating training and, most impressively, guerrilla artists decorating two of the concrete supports with bright and vibrant scenes of nature. Humanity is re-colonising this desolate void.   

So, far from being, as it may first appear, merely a scene of brutalist alienation - an elegy for a lost land, the contemporary landscape has character and interest aplenty; a mixture of historic features, re-imagined and reused, and what Nan Fairbrother describes as the "self-contained linear landscape" of the motorway. Stepping back into the picture post card Edwardian scenes there is much that we are not told when viewing this reassuring scene, as seemingly wholesome as a period drama, that may similarly alter the initial perception.

The bridge was on the edge of eighteenth century Kingswood Chase, a remnant of the much larger Royal Forest of Kingswood that covered 200 square miles until disafforestation in 1228. By the eighteenth century, and continuing into the nineteenth, Kingswood was viewed as a hot-bed of criminality, non-conformity, popular protest and general unruliness, with a rapidly growing population of colliers, quarrymen and other squatter-inhabitants. John Wesley sums up the areas reputation succinctly: "Few persons have lived long in the West of England who have not heard of the colliers of Kingswood: a people famous from the beginning hitherto, for neither fearing God nor regarding man". By the time of the black and white photographs shown here much of Kingswood and the areas surrounding Stapleton had become heavily populated and industrialised and Eastville Park, bounded by the bridge, had been established as a municipal green lung for the urban population. As it has largely remained, the area was already an oasis of residual or revenant rurality, surrounded by 'Ouses, Ouses, Ouses'. The chimera of old world stability and orderliness is further undermined by a decidedly non-photogenic landmark a mile down the road. At the opposite end of the village stood (and still stands) a huge Victorian complex that had seen time as a prison for 5,000 French soldiers during the Napoleonic wars, a lunatic asylum and workhouse for the poor.

Cycling home over the bridge and under the flyover I feel the full force of these diverse and conflicting temporal and spatial energies; a flash mob of liminal stimuli skulking in the shadows. Landscape as multi-sensory immersion. I sigh heavily at the imagined memory of the old house, 'Sunnybanks', (though I have never seen it) that used to stand on the higher ground above the bridge and was demolished to make way for the motorway embankment. But I also can't help finding the fleeting phenomenological experience of under-passing the concrete monolith exhilarating; sound-tracked by the disembodied harsh monotone of the traffic above, like a minimalist symphony of repetitive drones. And the prospect of the last mile home along the still green banks of the Frome, with the potential for sightings of heron, kingfisher or barn owl, spurs on my tired limbs and lifts the landscapist spirit further.       

References

Avon Archaeological Council and Avon Local History Association, 1982 Avon Past 7 Pamphlet.

Baker, Kenneth (Ed.), 2000 The Faber Book of Landscape Poetry London: Faber and Faber.

Bartlett, John, 2004 Images of England: Fishponds Stroud: Tempus.

Brace, Keith, 1971 Images of Bristol London: Robert Hale.

Fairbrother, Nan, 1972 New Lives, New Landscapes London: Penguin.

Johnson, Matthew, 2007 Ideas of Landscape Oxford: Blackwell.

Matless, David, 1998 Landscape and Englishness London: Reaktion.

Smith, Veronica, 2004 Images of England: Stapleton Stroud: Tempus. 

Wylie, John, 2007 Landscape Oxford: Routledge.

Off the map familiar

Source:  landofmaps

How the world would look if the land masses and oceans were inverted

Here are some strikingly idiosyncratic and tangential cartographical images (see more at Maps you never knew you needed).

Source: wtf.net

Every country Britain has ever invaded (all but 22) 

Source: landofmaps

The world using a different centre point than you are used to

Source: reddit.com

The USA drawn as a map from a fantasy novel

Navigating to a 'high forcing chamber of history'

The Chartist Cave:
Image from www.blaenau-gwent.gov.uk 

"The union met in secret on the dark side of the hill, by the light of a thousand candles" Ironmasters, The Men They Couldn't Hang

Participation in a day-into-night navigation course on the edge of the Brecon Beacons has got me ruminating on two unrelated topics, both stimulated by spending a cold Friday night on a moor looking for a cave: the understated value of moving through terrain using the basic disciplines of route-finding with compass and map; and a visceral piece of radical landscape history. 

The session was part of on-going training for the Black Mountains Upland Volunteers scheme that I have previously posted about.  At 4pm our small group ascended a track above the village of Trefil, just north of Tredegar on the high ground of Mynydd Llangynidr above the heads of the Ebbw and Sirhowy valleys; an area known with etymological accuracy as Blaenau, meaning 'heights, uplands, headwaters'. Before us stretched what would normally be a boggy morass of rough limestone moorland, but the ground was bone-hard on account of a lack of recent precipitation and the chill wind that whipped into our faces, like a perpetual slap. The temperature had remained resolutely low all day and, in R.S. Thomas' words, "the cold landscape returned my stare".

Jan Morris aptly describes the unusual feeling and topography of this transitional space between the, once mighty now post-industrial, valleys of Gwent and Glamorgan to the south and the majestic hill country of the Brecon Beacons National Park to the north:

"This is country unlike any other in Wales, partly because of its terrain, partly because of its fateful associations, and coming to it is like entering some high forcing chamber of history. Up your road goes, up the steep limestone ridge, pocked with caves and old workings and the remains of tramways, until crossing the ridge of the escarpment you find the harsh expanse of the Blaenau stretching there before you. Across it runs the cruel Heads of the Valleys highway, cars, trucks and motor-bikes crawling through the wind, and there are the remains of long-abandoned workings, and half-obliterated tips. It is colourless but compelling - the air rasping, the moorland glowering, and on the south side of the road the industrial valleys suddenly plunging away with their mines and chapels and railway tracks jam-packed and canyon-like towards the sea."

At first sight, our surroundings seemed unpromising country for navigating around: sink holes, cairns, springs, small pools and narrow water-courses the only features amongst the washed-out winter monotony of heather, course grass and sedge; the lazy meanders of the contours on the map mirroring the relative lack of variation in elevation on the ground. Slowly but surely we found our 'bearings', becoming accustomed to the coming dusky gloom; the relative sparseness of features actually sharpening our ability to match map with fact. And realising that small sink hole symbols on paper translate into mightily deep depressions in reality, literally swallowing up the ground. We were soon in our stride, communicating in the vocabulary of navigation, which has to be learnt like an esoteric code: magnetic North, back bearings, catch-points, hand rails, aiming off, Eastings and Northings.

Image from www.newportgwentdcs.org.uk 

And so, like a team of worker ants, and repeating our mantra of calculations -  bearing, distance and estimated time - we worked our way from feature to feature to the half way point, a limestone cavern known as the Chartist Cave. With a bit of help from our instructor to locate the entrance to the cave in the now pitch darkness, we encamped in the chamber to refuel before plotting a course back to our start point. 

And the cave is also the entry point to the second theme of this post. It is named for its use, according to local folklore, as a secret meeting place and arms factory for Chartists from the area in the 1830's. Chartism was "...the first independent working-class movement in the world, a snow-ball movement of social protest..." (Briggs). Although some Chartists took a moral stance against violence others were less idealistic, including those who used the caves around Blaenau to help prepare for a semi-military campaign of social disobedience and insurrection.   

In  1839 several thousand working men marched on Newport from the area and other locations across the South Wales valleys in protest at the imprisonment in Monmouth of a number of prominent English Chartists. On the morning of 5th November the 'Battle of Newport' took place, but it was an inglorious defeat for the by now undisciplined and drunken Chartist 'army' who were no match for the professional soldiery who had been stationed in the town to quell the uprising. Nine of the protesters were killed, most quickly fled back to their valley communities and their ring-leaders received predictably harsh sentences for their crimes of treason; reprieved from execution but transported to Australia for life.

On returning home, and with thoughts of this piece of history  brought vividly to life on a chill winters night, I was reminded of a lustily sung favourite song of old, Ironmasters by The Men They Couldn't Hang; a hymn to the radical uprisings of the era against the ironmasters and coal magnets of South Wales, "...from the smoky stacks of Merthyr to the hills of Ebbw Vale".

Although the Chartists ultimately failed in their own time, the rights for which they protested, including universal suffrage, would later become corner-stones of democratic systems around the world. In the words of E.P. Thompson, "we may thank them for these years of heroic culture". And yet, pondering the ruthless, exploitative industrialists of mid-nineteenth century South Wales and the modern day hegemony of global capitalism, I can't help thinking that The Men They Couldn't Hang were right: "Ironmasters, they always get their way".

References

Birkett, Bill, 2002. The Hillwalker's Manual. Milnthorpe: Cicerone.

Briggs, Asa, 1991. A Social History of England. London: Penguin.

Morris, Jan, 1998. Wales: Epic views of a small country. London: Penguin. 

Owen, Hywel Wyn, 1998. A Pocket Guide to the Place-Names of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Thomas, R.S., 1996. Amen in Selected Poems. London: Dent.

Thompson, E.P., 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage.

Blaenau-Gwent County Borough Council web site:
http://www.blaenau-gwent.gov.uk/8042.asp

Reflections on a year of Landscapism

And so my first 12 months of blogging on the landscape - of landscapism - reaches an end; a repository of thoughts given their head.

My aim has been to provide a forum to bring together, promote and discuss themes, subject matter and marginalia of all kinds on landscape: finding the connections across the landscape divides.


To ask questions about landscape management, the false dichotomy of urban v rural, tensions between sustainable transport, biodiversity and community food production and the new National Planning Policy Framework; to propose a Manifesto for a Working Landscape.

 To provide an evolving gazetteer to exploring landscape on the web; and suggest a biblio-resource for reading the landscape, ranging far and wide, from William Morris' News From Nowhere to Ross Raisin's God's Own Country; from Urban Wildscapes to Writing Britain: from Wasteland to Wonderland; from a wild utopian trilogy to a midwinter handlist to help survive the dark months.

To find wildness, places to be left alone with yourself; to seek out Robert Macfarlane's holloways, old ways and wild places, meander on paths and trackways, wander amongst ash: the shaggy signs of Pan and ramble on the urban fringe. To eulogize the watery life blood of the landscape where, men  may come and men may go, but I go on forever.

To explore landscapes of the past: a triptych of ruins, carved into the landscape, Avebury stone circle: 'an uncanny landscape', Dial Garreg: a story of stone and war propaganda films; to feel the history of a temporal space. As well as remembering more personal cognitive artifacts, a scrap of a memory: Arcadian dreaming.

To listen to songs which, like the grass, are evergreen; the sounds of PJ Harvey - Let England Shake, the Roman Roads of Land Observations, Dennis Wilson's River Song and the radical call to arms, The Land Song. To proclaim Here's a Health to the Barley Mow!

To gaze upon the local topographies and vaster world's of Pieter Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, David Hockney's A Bigger Picture, maps of the Old Straight Tracks of Glastonbury and the beginnings of a rising Pandaemonium stoking the Industrial Revolution.

To return to special places, the landscapes in particular of Kenilworth Castle, Bolton Abbey, Cold Ashton, Worth Valley and Hergest Ridge. To turn off the gadgets and experience the landscape where the path, winding like silver, trickles on; to ask, is there no end to this accursed forest? and enjoy being stumped.

To find new discoveries and different perspectives; a sense of hope in the age of collapse, the alternative future vision of the Dark Mountain Project, the practice of walking as drifting and seek inspiration from a new Westcoasting life. 

And to drift around the margins: listening to sound mapping, musing on a comedy of landscapes, enjoying Jimi Bush and the palimpsest designed landscapes of rural riding. 

All the while, perhaps, seeking Jerusalem; a personal, progressive and magical 'land of dreams'.

Wild utopian trilogy

Three books are occupying my thoughts at the moment; linked by their combination of a contemporary critique of the harsh realities of late nineteenth century capitalism and industrialization with a vision of a back to nature future, albeit with varying viewpoints on what a post-'civilisation' world could hold in store for humanity.

William Morris' News From Nowhere and Other Writings (1890) is full of hope and zeal for a more egalitarian future of rustic utopia. After London or Wild England  by Richard Jefferies (1885) is a much more ambiguous chronicle of the relapse of society into the barbarism of nature. The precursor to, and influence on, both books is also the least well-known, Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), an escape to a ficticious and flawed New World demi-paradise.

So here are some choice extracts from all three*, mixed together in a pleasing if not altogether coherent, and sometimes contradictory, soup: a wild utopian trilogy.

"What is that thought that is come into one's head as one turns around in the shadow of the roadside elm? A countryside worth fighting for, if that were necessary, worth taking trouble to defend its peace.

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

From an elevation there was nothing visible but forest and marsh. On the level ground and the plains the view was limited to a short distance, because of the thickets and the saplings which had now become young trees. The downs only were still partially open, yet it was not convenient to walk upon them except in the tracks of animals, because of the long grass which, being no more regularly grazed upon by sheep, as was once the case, grew thick and tangled. Furze, too, and heath covered the slopes, and in places vast quantities of fern. There had always been copses of fir and beech and nut-tree covers, and these increased and spread, while bramble, briar, and hawthorn extended around them.

 It was a monotonous life, but it was very healthy and one does not much mind anything when one is well.  The country was the grandest that can be imagined.  How often have I sat on the mountain side and watched the waving downs, with the two white specks of huts in the distance, and the little square of garden behind them; the paddock with a patch of bright green oats above the huts, and the yards and wool-sheds down on the flat below; all seen as through the wrong end of a telescope, so clear and brilliant was the air, or as upon a colossal model or map spread out beneath me.  Beyond the downs was a plain, going down to a river of great size, on the farther side of which there were other high mountains, with the winter’s snow still not quite melted; up the river, which ran winding in many streams over a bed some two miles broad, I looked upon the second great chain, and could see a narrow gorge where the river retired and was lost.  I knew that there was a range still farther back; but except from one place near the very top of my own mountain, no part of it was visible: from this point, however, I saw, whenever there were no clouds, a single snow-clad peak, many miles away, and I should think about as high as any mountain in the world.  Never shall I forget the utter loneliness of the prospect—only the little far-away homestead giving sign of human handiwork;—the vastness of mountain and plain, of river and sky; the marvellous atmospheric effects—sometimes black mountains against a white sky, and then again, after cold weather, white mountains against a black sky—sometimes seen through breaks and swirls of cloud—and sometimes, which was best of all, I went up my mountain in a fog, and then got above the mist; going higher and higher, I would look down upon a sea of whiteness, through which would be thrust innumerable mountain tops that looked like islands.

At first it is supposed that those who remained behind existed upon the grain in the warehouses, and what they would thresh by the flail from the crops left neglected in the fields. But as the provisions in the warehouses were consumed or spoiled, they hunted the animals, lately tame and as yet half wild. As these grew less in number, and difficult to overtake, they set to work again to till the ground, and cleared away small portions of the earth, encumbered already with brambles and thistles. Some grew corn and some took charge of sheep. Thus, in time, places far apart from each other were settled, and towns were built; towns, indeed, we call them to distinguish them from the champaign, but they are not worthy of the name in comparison with the mighty cities of old time. 

Under the elm tree these things puzzle me, and again my thoughts return to the bold men of that very countryside who, coming back from Ashdown field, scored that White Horse to look down for ever on the valley of the Thames; and I thought it likely that they had this much in common with the starlings and the bleak, that there was more equality among them than we are used to now, and that there would have been more models amongst them for Woden than one would be like to find in the Thames-side meadows.   

Turn the page, I say. The hay-field is a pretty sight this month seen under the elm, as the work goes forward on the other side of the way opposite the bean-field, till you look at the hay-makers closely. Suppose the haymakers were friends working for friends on land which was theirs, as many as were needed, with leisure and hope ahead of them instead of hopeless toil and anxiety, need their useful labour for themselves and their neighbours cripple and disfigure them and knock them out of shape of men fit to represent the Gods and Heroes? If under such conditions a new Ashdown had to be fought (against capitalist robbers this time), the new White Horse would look down on the home of men as wise as the starlings, in their equality, and so perhaps as happy."  

 *Albeit, the Morris contributions are from his contemporaneous essay Under an Elm-tree, or Thoughts in the Countryside rather than News From Nowhere itself.

Bibliography

Butler, Samual, 2006. Erewhon. London: Penguin.

Jefferies, Richard, 1980. After London. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morris, William, 1993. News From Nowhere and Other Stories. London: Penguin.