Landscape and Identity

Geographies of Nation and Class in England

Wendy Joy Darby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000323986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Geografía histórica

In England, perhaps more than most places, people's engagement with the landscape is deeply felt and has often been expressed through artistic media. The popularity of walking and walking clubs perhaps provides the most compelling evidence of the important role landscape plays in people's lives. Not only is individual identity rooted in experiencing landscape, but under the multiple impacts of social fragmentation, global economic restructuring and European integration, membership in recreational walking groups helps recover a sense of community. Moving between the 1750s and the present, this transdisciplinary book explores the powerful role of landscape in the formation of historical class relations and national identity. The author's direct field experience of fell walking in the Lake District and with various locally based clubs includes investigation of the roles gender and race play. She shows how the politics of access to open spaces has implications beyond the immediate geographical areas considered and ultimately involves questions of citizenship.

Introduction: Envisioning/Re-Visioning Landscape

In times when subjects of education have multiplied, it may seem at first sight a hardship to lay on the already heavily-pressed student a new science. But it will be found that the real effect of Anthropology is rather to lighten than increase the strain of learning. In the mountains we see the bearers of heavy burdens contentedly shoulder a carrying-frame besides, because they find its weight more than compensated by the convenience of holding together and balancing their load. So it is with the science of Man and Civilization which connects into a more manageable whole the scattered subjects of an ordinary education.

Tylor 1891: v

The construction of identity through recreational participation in valued and symbolic landscapes is a topic little explored in anthropology, even though such activities are assuming an increasingly important role in the lives of many individuals in the affluent countries of Western Europe, Asia, and the United States. Landscape remains largely unproblematized (Hirsch 1995).

Among the questions to be explored here are: How do leisure and exclusion operate as interrelated social and geographical realities based upon class, age, gender or ethnicity? Do England's National Parks represent fifty years of exclusion or inclusion? Whose views of the wider landscape are being preserved for whom? How does one explain the re-emergence of a freedom-to-roam movement now? In considering such questions, this ethnohistorical project takes a transdisciplinary approach to historical class relations and traces various steps in the cultural production of class and national identity as it has operated through landscape and access to it. A politics of access is analyzed through the landscapes of the Lake District and the Peak District, located in the uplands of northwestern England (see Map 1). By bringing fairly wide historical processes into conjunction with local specificities, this work contributes to effecting the magisterially paced, ongoing rapprochement between anthropology and history (Cohn [1980,1981] 1987; Guha 1987; Mitchell 1997) while it deals with space and viewing in another register than the simply geographical and pictorial (Green 1995).

Running throughout the work as a sub-text are the endnotes. I accord them importance as undergirdings of the whole. From that perspective I concur with the expression that 'God is in the Detail. And in the Footnotes' (Chadwick 1997: 16). One detail (also apparent in the endnotes) that is sufficiently naturalized to require foregrounding here is the extent to which landscape has been a male domain. A male and military gaze lay behind most topographical work; the viewer of landscapes on the European Grand Tour initially was most often male; the art market was dominated by men both as patrons and producers of landscapes; aestheticians who debated categories of landscape and their effects on the mind and feelings were male; early promoters of landscape tourism were male; the discourse of walking and mountaineering reflected a gendered symbolism of landscape; and landscapes be they representational or actual - were status appendages, much like the wives, mistresses and daughters of the men who held the land and ran the country.

As for walking in the landscape, Anne Wallace has written with great richness about its place in nineteenth-century English literature. Yet there is again an unconscious gendering in her seeing it as

an extension of Virgilian georgic accomplished by placing the walker in the ideological space vacated by the farmer. The result, which I call 'peripatetic', represents excursive walking as a cultivating labour capable of renovating both the individual and his society by recollecting and expressing past value.

(Wallace 1993: 8, 11)

This work moves beyond the literary framework of an educated elite, to show Wallace's nineteenth-century 'peripatetic' in a more 'pedestrian' light and to bring gender into the picture. It charts how an earlier elite's possession of the landscape by descriptive texts and enclosure is replaced by the dispossessed's regaining access to spaces of excursive walking.

This work contains three parts. The first (Chapters 1-3) delves into an aesthetically informed discourse of nation by tracing out the literary and artistic roots of landscape as an idiom for materializing culture. It brings into focus the eighteenth-century English cultural elite's 'imagined community' of painted, printed and actual unpeopled landscapes. It contextualizes this within the articulation and practices of British nationalism, and within the popularization of the Picturesque. It also uses this imagined community as a point from which to propose a series of related fields of tension within 'polite society,' and between polite society and those immiserated by the enclosure movement.

This first section culminates with the cultural valorization of the Lake District - its movement from empty space to valorized place. It deals with the substitution of mythic memory for real memory and makes the point that the myth-makers are outsiders. Long before its popularity as the Lake District, it was a 'place' for the women, children and men who labored and died there. The experiential intensity of place, wrought through their interaction with the land, can be extrapolated from the clearance of boulder- and stone-strewn valleys to clear fields and construct drystone fieldwalls. It can also be read in the far-flung network of walls over the mountainsides that form one of the most characteristic human-made landscape features of this region.

A verbal counterpart to these physical markers of place exists in the extraordinary number of named crags, outcroppings, ravines, passes and paths, rivulets, falls and tarns, patches of bog, scree slopes, mountain ridges and flanks that predate the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey. The spatial practices of physical engagement and naming form a double inscription of meaning set down on the landscape, defining it as place long before it became 'The Lake District.'

The second section (Chapters 4-6) continues the process of rendering landscape problematic within a political-economy paradigm. It widens the range of what is brought into view to include the Peak District where the class-based issue of access took on an increasingly strident pitch. The Lake District, around which a version of a homogeneous English national identity was being constructed by an educated elite, paradoxically became the site of cultural differentiation of class participation in this landscape. Both Peak and Lake District landscapes became sounding boards of national sentiment that exposed different claims to history - to the primacy of either pre- or post-Norman Englands.

The politics of access in the Peak District centered on poaching; in the Lake District, on aesthetics. The key to this difference is the vegetative cover. The Peak's moorland heather (Callunus vulgaris) is the preferred nesting site for red grouse (Lagopus lagopus scoticus) and their major food source. A grouse-shooting elite wanted to protect the grouse being reared on the moors for the kill. This pitted them both against locals who wanted to maintain ancient rights of way across the moors, and walkers from the surrounding industrial towns who wanted to wander at will upon areas of open moorland. Gamekeepers considered walkers inherently dangerous as disturbers of nesting birds and as outright poachers.

Since heather is not an overwhelming part of the Lake District's vegetative ensemble, grouse-rearing was not an issue there. But aesthetics was. Endowed with literary and visual significance since the early 1700s, Lake District landscapes came under threat of massive and permanent damage from rail and mining interests in the nineteenth century. Because opposition to such intrusions was conducted by a highly educated elite, it inaugurated a debate at a national level not only about preservation of these particular landscapes, but also about landscape preservation generally, and especially the preservation of those commons which had survived the depredations of parliamentary enclosures.

From the 1830s through the 1930s, legislative, legal and extra-legal challenges were made to legal, quasi-legal and illegal practices concerning access. The central areas around which these battles were fought were the Lake and Peak Districts. The crosscurrents between actions taken in both areas fueled post-1945 enabling legislation by which ten national parks were established in the uplands of England and Wales between 1951 and 1957, Those parks are: Lake District, Peak District, Dartmoor, Snowdonia (all designated in 1951); Pembrokeshire Coast, North York Moors (1952); Exmoor, Yorkshire Dales (1954); Northumberland (1956); and the Brecon Beacons (1957). These ten parks represent about 9 percent of the land surface of England and Wales (see Map 1). This section also deals with the re-emergence in the 1990s of demands for open access to land both within and outside national parks, and the environmental rhetoric used in contested spatial practices.

The third section (Chapters 7 and 8) moves into the ethnographic present, drawing upon interviews with representatives of national walking organizations and upon participant-observation with walkers in the Lake and Peak Districts and locally-based walking clubs. This peripatetic ethnography examines how social relations are spatialized and how spatial relations are socialized; it investigates the way in which walking is a socially constitutive force shaping personal identity and a sense of community in the face of social fragmentation, global economic restructuring, and European integration.

Map 1 Location of National Parks

While problematizing the culture of walkers in a highly stratified society (as thickly strewn with class markers as Wordsworth's hills were strewn with daffodils), it becomes apparent that a primary question is whether or not walking groups cross-cut class as they create spaces for new structures of feeling. A gender-centered view of walking is considered, as is ethnic minorities' sense of the English landscape as a landscape of non-identity. The powerful attachment to place, particularly the Lake District, is explored through the voices of three women whose lives have been greatly shaped by engagement with the landscape. Each voice recapitulates a major theme of this work.

The Conclusion considers whether the northern mountainous landscape of the Lake District still functions as another version or vision of England. A London-oriented Home Counties image of the southeast is projected in the literature as the quintessence of the 'Crown Heartland' of 'Deep' England, another example of métonymie misrepresentation, of how 'the South' is especially made to stand for the whole of a country or region (Cosgrove, Roscoe and Nycroft 1996; Fernandez 1988; Wiener 1981; Wright 1985). The Conclusion addresses the issue of whether, under the impact of Britain's social fragmentation and economic restructuring, the idea that certain places are more truly 'England' is an idea put into practice - in this instance - through the practice of walking.

Part I
Representational

The representation of landscape is not innocent of a politics. It is deeply embedded in relations of power and knowledge. Part I makes those relations visible by presenting landscape and landscape representations from various interrelated perspectives. This multiple framing helps give voice to silences in landscape images and shows how understanding and experience of landscape and landscape imagery are socially grounded in historically specific notions of exclusion and inclusion. Of central concern is the socio-cultural location of the viewer, the view, and visual and written representations of landscape. Each chapter in this section of the book addresses the political, economic, historic, sentimental or educational underpinnings of the society that produced and consumed landscapes and their representations, and shows how people literally in the same place can inhabit figuratively quite different places. In this respect, Part I produces what might be termed a Foucauldian archaeology of landscape.

Viewed this way, landscape provides a way into the question of culture: its value, its perduration, its categories of worthy and unworthy, and the construction of culture-bound identity-forming myths. It leads to considerations of how culture subsumes the individual at the same time that individual agency helps shape culture, and of how the individual perceives the self as part of a specific culture, especially at periods of doubt caused by social or national trauma, such as agricultural or industrial revolutions, the growth of Empire, war, or the aftermath of war. Operating in a variety of registers, landscape becomes a focus for exploring criteria of inclusion and exclusion: as those criteria are imposed by a specific class, and how they are mediated by gender, aesthetic experience, community or class aspirations.

Part I deals with the conventions and historical context of landscape imagery, examining - within the context of eighteenth-century England - which individuals and classes command what views, and at whose expense. It is concerned with conditions of distance in picturesque scenery and its relationship to social distances. It maps out the social and cultural authority of the culture-bearers, and the prerequisites for understanding a view in terms of other actual, literary or pictorial views. It brings into common focus England's mountainous periphery and the internal sites of tension and debate in the political construction of Britain, showing the deep intertwining of landscape representation and political representation.

one
Critical Perspectives: The Class/Ification of Views

Operating ... at the juncture of history and politics, social relations and cultural perceptions, landscape has to be ... an area of study that blows apart the conventional boundaries between the disciplines.

Bender 1993: 3

Introduction

What follows constitutes trespass. But I think it is worth the risk. I am searching for what I have come to understand as more or less 'unpeopled landscapes' that have occurred in various cultural arenas. I acknowledge that my...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps and Figures
• List of Plates
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Access Day 1999
• Introduction: Envisioning/Re-visioning Landscape
• Conclusion: Envisioning/Re-Visioning Community
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index