Rewilding: An Alternative View

The latest issue of Landscapes journal is now out. It includes a review article I have written entitled Rewilding: An Alternative View, a critique of the lack of understanding and appreciation of the historical, human and cultural elements of the landscape in George Monbiot’s recent work of polemic, Feral, and the wider rewilding movement in general: 

"Whilst many share Monbiot’s concerns with industrialised food production, the narrowing of land ownership and the long drift from direct engagement with the natural environment, I can’t help wondering how much empathy the rewilding movement has with the enchanted warp and weft of the landscapes of Britain (and elsewhere); something as special as, but maybe less tangible than, the endangered animal and plant life that many people understandably wish to restore to good health."

Also in this issue, articles on the subterranean military and industrial complexes below Corsham in Wiltshire, the cult of waterfalls in eighteenth century Wales, the landscapes of sustainable agriculture and a study of islandscapes. An eclectic and stimulating collection, as ever.

Landscapes is a must for anyone with an interest in a multi-disciplinary, multi-layered approach to landscape and sense of place. You can subscribe or pay per view on line here.

'If any solitary wanderers read these notes...'

The delight of opening a book at a random page and finding ...

“This aerial photo might be of many of the hundreds of hidden places in England: here it is used as a diagram to illustrate the fate of ‘escapists’ …”.

Wasdale in the Lake District

The Land of England - Dorothy Hartley (1979)

Local topographies and vaster worlds: Hunters in the Snow

Cycling to and from work today, through a frozen, sub-zero landscape, I have been drawn into my favourite landscape painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Hunters in the Snow.

The picture is one of a series of panels, completed in 1565, representing the activities of Flemish peasant communities during the changing seasons (and symbolising December and January). This calendar-based cosmology was a common motif in medieval art, rooted in religious iconography; but Bruegel and his contemporaries were the first to crystallise such scenes of interacting nature and humanity into what would later become the established genre of 'factual' landscape painting, encompassing "...both local topographies and vaster worlds..." (Cosgrove, 2008).  

Art historians also find interest in the work as an early example of the use of perspective in landscape painting:

"Our eye roams from a high vantage point over an extensive, diverse landscape that develops from the cultivated foreground area to an ever wilder nature in the distance. Principle lines direct the eye along a diagonal that begins with the houses on the left, accentuated by a stark row of bare trees, and extends to the lower right, into the valley. Only there, where it runs up against the mountain barrier and takes the opposite, diagonal direction towards the plain extending left to the horizon, is a sense of depth created which counters the dominant horizonal of a panorama" (Wolf, 2008).

On a broader historical note the painting presents stark evidence of the severity of winter throughout the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of comparatively lower global temperatures during the post-medieval/ early modern period. 
     

Self portrait of Bruegel, who died in 1569, aged 44

For me though, the fascination of this picture is its representation of 'real' people and their day-to-day activities in a living, naturalistic landscape; in the words of Kenneth Clark "the expression of an all-embracing sympathy with humanity...in which the accidents of human life are one with the weather and seasons. Few works of art are less in need of commentary". No figures here from heroic mythology or religious representations of ecstatic joy or demonic pain and damnation. There is real empathy with the hunter's and their dogs returning, weary from a day in the woods and fields. 

And each viewing spotlights a different element of small detail: the inn sign hanging precariously from its awning; the frozen water-wheel; the people, young and old, playing various games on the iced-over ponds; the snow-covered bramble in the foreground and the various breeds of dog in the pack accompanying the eponymous hunters.

The framework for these scenes within a scene is the expertly realised combination of the sturdy-looking buildings of the village (no rude hovels here), the blue-grey of the wintry sky and frozen watercourses, the skeletal woods and trees of the foreground, middle and far distance and the all-pervading whiteness of the snow. To me the only wrong note (a weakness it seems of many landscape artists) is the depiction of the distant high ground as ludicrously precipitous crags; this remember is Flanders!

Other less well-known but no less interesting pictures in the 1565 cycle include:


The Gloomy Day (February-March)

  The Hay Harvest (June-July)

 The Corn Harvest (August-September)

The Return of the Herd (October-November)

Select Bibliography

Andrews, Malcolm, 1999 Landscape and Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Clark, Kenneth, 1966 Landscape in Art. London: Pelican

Cosgrove, Denis, 2008 Geography & Vision: Seeing, imagining and representing the world. London: IB Tauris

Shama, Simon, 1996 Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana 

Wolf, Norbert, 2008 Landscape Painting. Cologne: Taschen

New 'Landscapes'

Returing to the theme of a previous post, the latest issue of Landscapes has just come through my letterbox; always a stimulating read. Graham Fairclough's editorial articulates the journal's balance between continued coverage of its landscape history and archaeology bed-rock, whilst also reflecting wider horizons and inter-disciplinary collaboration in landscape study; emphasising that "...the idea of landscape, the historical understanding of landscape, and a sensibility to landscape change through time, is surely going to be central to political debate well beyond the heritage domain."