From time to time I will post 'bite size' chunks of the material I am preparing for my PhD thesis: works in progress, but content which I feel may be of interest to a wider audience. All will be very much draft versions, not necessarily - probably not - reflecting the final wording that will eventually appear in the Thesis. In-text references are included but a full bibliography is not. This paper is based on a section of the initial literature review and follows on from my research paper #1 and research paper #2.
Further landscape perspectives: experience and perception
Literary and artistic representations
‘A humble
chapel of David the Archbishop (St David) formerly stood decorated only with
moss and ivy … a situation truly calculated for religion and more adapted to
canonical discipline than all the monasteries in Britain.’
(Gerald
of Wales in Thorpe 1978, 96-7).
In the
above description of the location of Llanthony Priory in Monmouthshire Gerald of Wales is not
simply reporting the topographical features that he observed, his words are
heavy with symbolism. Allegorical descriptions of the landscape and setting of
monasteries were common in contemporary writing during the monastic period. For
instance, Clarke (2006, 68) has shown how the
fenland houses of Glastonbury (Somerset), Ely (Norfolk) and Ramsey (Kent) exploited the
symbolic potential of their local watery landscapes (and the practical
transformations through drainage and cultivation which they were enacting) in
twelfth and thirteenth century texts and pastoral conventions which ‘transform
the realities of topography and monastic land management into allegories of
spiritual cultivation and triumph’. Later
representations of medieval monastic life and landscape in art and literature
that go beyond using monasticism as a suitably archaic and esoteric setting for
mystery and Gothic intrigue
are relatively sparse. One writer who spent much time in monasteries across
Europe during the middle twentieth century was Patrick Leigh Fermor. In his
vivid and empathetic prose can be found descriptions which evoke the imagined
monastic landscape of the Middle Ages. This account of his arrival at Abbeye de
la Trappe in Normandy is worth quoting at length as illustration:
‘It (the
abbey) dwindled off into farm buildings, and came to an end in the fields where
thousands of turnips led their secret lives … Among the furrows an image
mouldered on its pedestal; and under a sky of clouded steel, the rooks cawed
and wheeled and settled. Across the December landscape, flat and waterlogged
with its clumps of drizzling coppice and barren-looking pasture-land, ran a
rutted path which disappeared beneath an avenue of elm-trees … Isolated monks,
all of them hooded and clogged, at work in the fields, ploughing or chopping
wood, dotted this sodden panorama and the report of their falling axes reached
the ear long seconds after the visual impact. Others were driving long herds of
cattle to graze. Two of them would converse for a few seconds in their
extraordinary semaphore, and then ‘Viens,
la blanche!’ or, ‘á droite, grosse
bête!’ would break the silence as a cow or a laggard cart-horse was urged
through a gap in a hedge. Then the stillness fell once again’ (Fermor 1988,
67).
More generally, the combination of landscape,
nature and sense of place with language, music and imagery is one of the most
potent and enduring alliances within artistic and literary practice. As Grigson
(1984, xiii) has noted, it is artists, folklorists, poets, musicians and
writers who are often able to most memorably articulate ‘an immediate record …
of observations, of something seen, something sensed, something or other felt
and enjoyed, in the country around them’. Here we can see another largely
untapped potential confluence with landscape
archaeology practice.
Academic
analysis of art and literature has tended to view the landscape as
inferior and subordinate to the main subject of the work (human activity,
buildings, animals and so on). Landscape, as background, organises or frames
the subject to give context or definition, but interpretation of its
intrinsic significance is often overlooked (Andrews 1999, 5-7); an echo of the aforementioned
peripheral position of landscape in the study of monastic sites and their
history until relatively recently. In an art history context, for instance, the traditional
position presupposes a straightforward relationship between landscape, or a good view, and art, with the painterly
image as the prime expression of this. The artistic
representation elicits an instinctive human response, which may be culturally
influenced but essentially comes from within. A more sophisticated constructionist view has since become
dominant, emphasising how we select, edit and interpret what we see. In Andrews
(1999, 1-3, 15) formulation, the process of producing an artistic
representation of a particular scene is twofold: ‘Land into landscape; landscape into art’, achieving a
combining of the actual terrain in view and the pictorial image; in effect ‘the
dissolving of the two together’.
It was on a walking tour in 1793 that William
Wordsworth passed through the Wye valley and was inspired to write Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey, the final poem in his ground-breaking Lyrical Ballads collection with Coleridge (Daiches and Flower 1979, 119). Wordsworth focus was less on the
narrow aesthetic vision of Gilpin and was guided by a more physical and
emotional immersion in the landscape, to him the ruined abbey resonated with
‘the still sad music of humanity’ (Hardyment 2012, 76). The ruins of monastic
houses featured regularly in the prodigious output of JMW Turner and he painted
Llanthony Priory, Tintern Abbey and other topographical sites in the area. Of
course, Turner and other landscape painters of the time were not seeking to
develop an accurate documentary record of what they saw. Nevertheless, their
work provides not only much topographical evidence (see Figure 1) but is also
of value to the historian as a nuanced commentary on the tensions between the
emerging new world of agri-industrial process and infrastructure and the
buildings and land-use of earlier ages (Hamilton 2003, 11).
Figure 1: Llanthony Abbey,
Cwmyoy, Monmouthshire by JMW Turner, 1794. The painting shows the surrounding
hills higher and more precipitous than in reality, with a similarly
romanticised river scene in the foreground. However, also clearly represented
is the still now extant curvilinear enclosure on Loxey Tump above the ruins,
which may originate as a medieval sheep corral operated by the Priory.
Both
Llanthony and Tintern have continued to be the subject of much artistic work,
inspired by the combination of romantic monastic ruins, a legacy of
spirituality and dramatic landscape setting. The study area as a whole
also has a rich heritage of poetry, prose and folklore with a strong sense of
place, a repository recording encounters and experiences captured whilst moving
through the landscape which can help to bridge the gap between landscape archaeology and cultural theories of
identity, memory and perception embodied in the landscape (Dunham 2007, 183). There is also, as
Macfarlane (2014, xxviii-xxix) highlights, a more esoteric legacy: ‘Perhaps
because of its combination of wildness (high ground) and habitability (rich
valleys), the southern English-Welsh borderland is a region that has bred a
peculiar number of seers, savants and mystics’. For instance, Alfred
Watkins fieldwork in pursuit of his fanciful and discredited ley-lines theory
during the 1920s can be seen as, in Matless’ words, ‘… an eccentric
mirror-image of field archaeology’ as it was being developed and codified by
Crawford and others at the time (1998, 82). An additional relevance is that most
of the topographical descriptions and illustrations that appeared in Watkins’
book, The Old Straight Track (1925) are
of the south-eastern Welsh Marches. The symbolism and referencing of temporal
heritage within the landscape in artistic and literary representation, specifically in relation to the monastic legacy of the study area, would seem a
fruitful evidence-base for further investigation.
An example of an evolving literary conceptualisation of landscape
that can also be drawn into this discussion is found in the flowering of what
has been, somewhat misleadingly, called the New Nature Writing of the last
decade or so (Procter 2014, 78). Perhaps in contradistinction to the long
tradition of British natural history and topographical writing which has
provided a balm of rural idyll for an increasingly urbanised population,
contemporary writing on nature, landscape and place is in many ways coaxial to the cultural
geographical responses to landscape discussed later in this section. Iain Sinclair
has described natural historian Richard Mabey as ‘the unacknowledged pivot’ between
an earlier tradition of environmental and nature writing and both the more
experiential ‘new nature’ genre and those described as psycho-geographers
(Hardyment 2012, 183; Mabey 2010, 11). All
share a rejection of the narrow confines of subject-specific discourse and a
recognition of the interplay between human culture and the natural environment, reviving
the cadence of earlier generations of British writers such as John Clare,
Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas (Procter 2014, 78).
As
this brief and partial synopsis has shown, sense of place is a vital component
in a remarkably wide range of artistic and literary work. Topographical
knowledge of the places and landscapes that form the subject matter can certainly
assist in our understanding of art, music and writing (Daiches and Flower 1979,
7). However, the relationship is reciprocal: an analysis of art and literature
inspired by or interpreting place can help our understanding of how these
landscapes, and perceptions of them, have evolved over time.
Cultural geography and landscape
A
return now to Johnson’s (2007) assertion that well-established empirical
techniques and post-modern experiential approaches need not be mutually
exclusive when studying historic landscapes. Both, in fact, embody the ancient
Greek notion of theoria: to look, to
contemplate, to speculate; or, in Walter’s (1988, 19-20) words, ‘a complex but
active mode of observation’. The rich potential, largely untapped, to blend cultural
geographical discourse on how places are perceived, experienced and remembered
with a more conventional landscape
archaeology approach, as advocated by Fairclough and Johnson and outlined in my research paper #1 will
now be examined (with due regard to the sage warnings from Fleming and others
on the need for a bedrock of empirical context and substance when considering
landscape perception).
A
central concern of the New Geography that developed during the late 1960s and
through to the early 1980s was to reframe notions of space, place and landscape
through the prism of experiential perspectives, as articulated, for instance, through the
concept of phenomenology. This
approach viewed the environment as more than just a passive backdrop or
external object of the spectator’s gaze; providing a challenge to more traditional ideas
of landscape as simply a way of seeing the world or a repository of empirical
material data (Creswell 2004, 12-13; Tilley 1994, 10; Wylie 2007, 144). Such a
paradigm drew on European philosophy concerned with the nature of existence, in
particular the concepts of dwelling, being in the world and embodiment, the
intertwining of self and landscape as the basis of experience as espoused by philosophical
theorists Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Tilley 1994, 13-14; Wylie
2007, 140-151).
More
recently Tim Ingold has revived this questioning of the notion of landscape as
a way of seeing the world and the Cartesian duality between culture:nature and
observer:observed that has traditionally informed cultural geography,
anthropology, archaeology and Western philosophical thought as a whole (Ingold
2000, 189; Wylie 2007, 145). His challenge to this order is to build on
Heidegger’s ‘dwelling perspective’, binding nature and culture together whilst
also recognising the dynamism inherent within landscape processes: ‘It is
through being inhabited that the world becomes a meaningful environment’ (Ingold
2000, 173).
Thus a ‘human ecodynamic’ approach is constructed, requiring an integrated
research methodology (McGlade 1999, 465).
That raw spatial entity
becomes landscape through perception and memory has been a central concern of
anthropology and cultural geography in recent times (Wylie 2007, 191). Landscapes
are increasingly seen as ‘a form of codification of history itself’ and, as
such, embody remembrance and invoke the past (Stewart and Stratham 2003, 1); or
rather, the physical and perceptual remains of multiple pasts, including those more
distant and open to different interpretations (Holtorf and Williams 2006, 237;
Shama 1996, 10; Tilley 1994, 11). However, as Holtorf and Williams (2006,
236-7) have identified, landscape
archaeology ‘rarely considers how memories (including mythologies,
genealogies as well as cultural, community, and personal histories) were
inherited, inhabited, invented and imagined through the landscape’. In reality,
physical experience of the landscape and local social customs, relations and
memory are indivisible. Furthermore, topographical reminders have often been
fundamental as a way of spatial remembering and interpreting in times of social
and economic change (Walsham 2011, 7; Whyte 2009, 2, 9). There is, therefore, considerable scope to more effectively connect and cross-reference the recording of material traces through archaeological fieldwork with evidence of how
landscapes have been remembered and reappropriated by successive generations,
through the interpretative layers provided by oral folk memories, antiquarian
investigation, Romantic artistic representation, the modern heritage industry
and so on (Holtorf and Williams 2006, 238-242) (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: The Stony Way, Tintern, Monmouthshire: A major
routeway connecting Tintern Abbey with its outlying granges and manors during
the monastic period, now a backwater recreational path but with the remnants of
its engineered medieval surface still clearly visible and echoed in the name of the path; its past also
remembered through inclusion in the Cistercian Way long distance walking route
(Author).
A
phenomenological approach to landscape, based on experience, memory and
perception has manifested itself widely across the humanities and artistic
practice, demonstrating its practical utilisation as a distinctive form of
landscape study that can supplement other approaches (Wylie 2013, 57, 61). In an archaeological
context, phenomenology has been particularly pioneered in prehistoric studies
(see, for instance, Bradley 2000; Tilley 1994, 2004, 2010), where a coalescing
of anthropology, archaeology and performance practice has emerged (Wylie 2007,
169). This can be seen as part
of a broader exploration of the social and political dimension of landscape now
firmly established in the archaeology of prehistory and its management as a
heritage resource (McGlade 1999, 459). For instance, as illustrated by
Darvill’s (1999, 116) advocacy of a ‘space-time-action model’ in which the
analysis of the physical distribution of sites and features is a starting point
for investigating social action and experience across the landscape rather than
an end in itself.
As
most comprehensively practiced and explained by Christopher Tilley (2004, 219),
the phenomenology of prehistoric landscapes is characterised by a tactile and
field-oriented approach, foregrounded by direct in situ encounters that go beyond
the standard interactions with artefacts, sites and landscapes of drawing
plans, photography, mapping and excavation: activities that disembody the
evidence from its landscape context through conversion into text and imagery,
producing what Thrift has described as ‘dead geographies’ (Wylie 2007, 171).
The aim is to reclaim landscape as a holistic term embracing body, place,
perception and the relationship between people and place, to identify an ‘intelligent
landscape’ in which the topography and physiography of land and thought are
distinct but linked (Tilley 1994, 14; 2004, 25). An approach Ingold
(2005, 122) has described as ‘a manifesto for a genuinely outdoor archaeology’,
a response to the paradox that much of the writing up, analysis and theorising
of archaeological fieldwork takes place indoors i.e. away from the experience
of being in and inhabiting the landscape under scrutiny, through sight, sound
and other senses and feelings.
Criticisms of the phenomenological
approach to landscape
Such
approaches have not been without their critics and sceptics, indeed
phenomenology in particular has been viewed with suspicion by many in the
academic disciplines in which it has been practiced (Wylie 2007, 180). There has
been a perception that it amounts to little more than an ambiguous abstract
theory, removed from practical experience, lacking a clear and valid methodology and dislocated from environmental,
socio-economic, historical, and indeed wider landscape, contexts (McGlade 1999,
461; Wylie 2007, 139-140, 180-1). Such claims are strongly refuted by its
advocates who counter that everyday experience and field-based practice are central
tenants of the approach. In Tilley’s (1994, 11) words it requires ‘a continuous
dialectic between ideas and empirical data’. In relation to its archaeological
application, Fleming (2007, 89) has questioned how well the fieldwork
methodology of the phenomenological approach has been established, in contrast
to the more clearly formulated and tested techniques of modern landscape archaeology. More specifically, the
veracity of claims made about the siting of, for example, certain Neolithic
monuments following phenomenological research has been queried (Barrett and Ko
2009, 275).
More
fundamentally, the charge has been levelled that there is an underpinning
romanticising of rural, pre-modern and non-Western ways of experiencing
landscape, with a simplistic and nostalgic view of the ‘more authentic’
engagement of the past in comparison to modern, detached, objective interaction
(Wylie 2007, 181-2). In reference to the medieval period in particular, Bull
(2005) has outlined the many pitfalls of applying a modern value system or even
a mock medieval interpretation to how
people thought and acted during the Middle Ages, an unconscious trap that it would
be easy for a phenomenological viewpoint to fall into.
The
tensions between landscape
archaeology and post-modernism in the form of phenomenology and other
post-processual theory were recorded in the series of exchanges between Fleming
and Johnson previously alluded to in research paper #1. This is a debate which could perhaps run and
run, but to the outside eye Fleming’s (2008, 76) even-handed conclusion that,
as with other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences,
post-modernism can bring refreshing innovation to existing landscape archaeology praxis rather
than replacing it seems to be a judgement that most could agree with. Such a view seems to fit
well with Wylie’s (2007, 186) assertion that the phenomenological approach has ‘identified
new topical grounds and new forms of research practice, at once enriching and
diversifying the ambit of landscape studies’.
Psycho-geography and deep
topography
A further layer of cultural
geographical thought will now be brought into the discussion: an approach to
landscape and place, psycho-geography, that has to date had limited convergence
with phenomenological ideas and practice, let alone those of landscape archaeology. In its archaeological
and anthropologist incarnations, phenomenology has generally concerned itself
with a rural context. In contrast, with its loose origins both in the English
literary tradition of radical
commentary on the underbelly of the city, largely centred on London,
and the dérive (unplanned journey) of the Dadist and Situationist art and intellectual movements of
mid-twentieth century Paris, psycho-geography has largely remained resolutely
urban in focus (Coverley 2006, 12). The common ground between the two is
the focus on direct experiential engagement with spatial surroundings,
generally through the agency of walking.
Perhaps because it is quite nebulous and
resistant to definition, psycho-geography has become something of a catch-all
term, a meeting point for a number of ideas and traditions with interwoven
histories relating to the convergence of psychology and geography: the impact
of the geographical environment on the human mind, emotions and behaviours
(Coverley 2006, 10-11). In essence, psycho-geography provides a fresh way to
read and interpret geographical space and bring together normally disparate
subject-matter.
The work of Iain Sinclair in political perambulations through contested spaces
in and around London has proved particularly influential (see, for example, Sinclair
2003, 2011), but perhaps the magnus
opus of a contemporary
emerging landscape philosophising that can be loosely aligned with the psycho-geographic
tradition is W.G. Sebald's The
Rings of Saturn (1995).
Sebald recounts a ground-breaking narrative of a long East Anglian walk that
becomes a portal for evocations of and meditations on an array of times, places
and people. Young (2010, 24) has
commented that: ‘Both these authors are adept at springing out the hermetic and
esoteric histories lying latent in the landscape’.
Nick Papadimitriou is another writer who has been labelled as a psycho-geographer. In Scarp: In Search
of London’s Outer Limits (2012), he defines his approach
more specifically as Deep Topography.
This terminology could also be used to describe the work of writers and
researchers, largely operating outside of the academic arena, such as Keiller
(2013), Robinson (1990) and Self (2007). Exponents of a more nuanced counterpart
to psycho-geography, less shackled to its conceptual and urban prescriptions
though also an even less theoretically sharpened approach.
Self (2007, 11-12) has described deep topography as ‘minutely detailed,
multi-level examinations of select locales that impact upon the writer’s own
microscopic inner-eye’, combining ecology, history, poetry and sociology. As Papadimitriou’s ventures into deep topography throughout
the Middlesex-Hertfordshire boundary lands and Sebald’s long existential walk
along the East Anglian coast have demonstrated, any landscape can in principle
be opened up to what Sinclair has described as: ‘psycho-geography lite.
It was a long way from the Situationists but it suited the English sentiment
about walking, deep-topography, historical scavenging’ (Kobek 2014, 7).
Although psycho-geographical
texts and practice have attracted academic interest in recent years, this has
tended to be within the confines of cultural geography and literary studies and
focused on the urban experience. There has been little
interaction with other disciplines traditionally concerned with landscape:
ecology, history, archaeology and so forth. It is perhaps worth speculating
that the critique of and suspicions around phenomenology outlined above would
be equally manifest in relation to psycho-geography and deep topography,
particularly as it is generally practised outside an academic or professional
setting. The underpinning philosophy and praxis here is perhaps though closer to more established
approaches to landscape and place than one might initially think as
archaeology, ecology and local history are all disciplines partially dependent
on a dedicated cadre of amateur enthusiasts. Self (2007, 12) has proclaimed
that practitioners of psycho-geography are ‘really only local historians with
an attitude problem’, though often viewed with suspicion, if noted at all, by
those in professional landscape study fraternities.
Experience and perception in the study of historic landscapes
The adoption of the types of approaches
that explicitly examine experience and perception considered here has been somewhat under-developed in the study of historic landscapes, despite the fact that there would
appear to be considerable scope for greater application in considering how
people moved through and engaged with their surroundings (Gardiner and Rippon
2007, 6; Gilchrist 2009, 391; Holtorf and Williams 2006, 237). Examples would
include Altenberg’s (2003) comparative consideration of space and identity in
case studies drawn from perceived marginal areas of medieval Britain and
Scandinavia, and Johnson’s (2002) adoption of a phenomenological approach to
underscore his study of the role of castles as elite stage settings, reflective
of a focus on symbolism when considering designed medieval landscapes. Nicola Whyte’s Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and
Memory, 1500-1800 (2009) can also be cited as a novel example of landscape archaeology research that
foregrounds understanding and integrating people’s perception, memory, interpretation
and experience of landscape, rather than focussing more narrowly on economic
and environmental factors to explain landscape evolution, rooted in evidence
from detailed local case studies. As Whyte (2009, 5) contends: ‘Understanding
the landscape, as it was ‘inhabited’, should not be confined to prehistory’.
As detailed in the hand list
brochures for the Sites of Inspiration:
Tintern Abbey and Llanthony Priory exhibitions at Abergavenny and Chepstow
Museums in 2014. The
Llanthony valley has been a particular foci for artists, notably during the
period in which sculptor and typographer Eric Gill established a bohemian
artistic-religious community at Capel-y-ffin in the 1920s.
Books such as Jefferies’ Wild Life
in a Southern County (2011) and Thomas’ The
South Country (2009), chronicled not only flora and fauna but also the
human life of communities whose everyday lives were immersed in the landscape,
based on intimate knowledge and capacious walking.
Examples would include: Ingold’s
(2000) already mentioned application in anthropology; Land Art based on bodily
contact and experience of landscape as practised by, for example, Andy Goldsworthy,
Richard Long and Robert Smithson; Richard Skelton’s experimental musical and
literary projects in specific locations using sound, art, photography and
archive research to reflect on the landscape and its inhabitants (Hudson 2015,
65-6; Skelton 2010); practice and performance studies involving
direct participation of walking, driving, climbing, gardening etc.; and movement
and mobility studies, connecting eye, body and land (Lund 2012; Pearson and
Shanks 1997; Wylie 2005; 2007, 166, 177; 2013, 61).
The experimental encounters
with sites, materials and landscapes in Shanks and Pearson’s Theatre/ Archaeology (2001) being a
prime example.
A further example
would be Worpole and Orton's (2005, 2013) exploration of the marginal
countryside of the estuary indented, marsh rich and semi-industrial Essex
coastline: a liminal landscape in close proximity to, but also estranged from,
the urban expanse of London.
