Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places

Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places

by Anna Pavord
Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places

Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places

by Anna Pavord

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Overview

Landskipping is a ravishing celebration of landscape, its iridescent beauty and its potential to comfort, awe and mesmerise. In spirit as Romantic as rational, Anna Pavord explores the different ways in which we have, throughout the ages, responded to the land. In the eighteenth century, artists first started to paint English scenery, and the Lakes, as well as Snowdon, began to attract a new kind of visitor, the landscape tourist. Early travel guides sought to capture the beauty and inspiration of waterfall, lake and fell. Sublime! Picturesque! they said, as they laid down rules for correctly appreciating a view.

While painters painted and writers wrote, an entirely different band of men, the agricultural improvers, also travelled the land, and published a series of remarkable commentaries on the state of agricultural England. They looked at the land in terms of its usefulness as well as its beauty, and, using their reports, Anna Pavord explores the many different ways that land was managed and farmed, showing that what is universal is a place's capacity to frame and define our experience.

Moving from the rolling hills of Dorset to the peaks of the Scottish Highlands, this is an exquisite and compelling book, written with zest, passion and deep understanding.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781408868942
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date: 01/28/2016
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 272
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Anna Pavord's books include her bestseller, The Tulip, The Naming of Names, and her most recent work, The Curious Gardener. Her column in the Independent newspaper appeared in it from its launch in 1986 to its closure in 2016. She writes and presents programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4 and served for ten years on the Gardens Panel of the National Trust, the last five as Chairman.
For the last thirty years she has lived in Dorset, England.
Anna Pavord is the gardening correspondent for THE INDEPENDENT and the author of widely praised gardening books including PLANT PARTNERS and THE BORDER BOOK. She wrote for the OBSERVER for twenty years, has contributed to COUNTRY LIFE, ELLE DECORATION and COUNTRY LIVING, and is an associate editor of GARDENS ILLUSTRATED. For the last thirty years she has lived in Dorset, England where she is currently making a new garden. Constantly experimenting with new combinations of flowers and foliage, she finds it a tremendous source of inspiration.

Table of Contents

Beginning: The Sugar Loaf 1

A Picnic with Pythagoras

Celts against Romans

Which Landscapes?

Wasdale

The Fell Hounds

Part 1 Prospects and Painters

Chapter 1 Looking at the Lakes 13

The First Tourists

Looking by the Book

Thomas Gray and his Traitorous Claude Glass

In Search of Wordsworth

Suspended Between Two Firmaments

Chapter 2 Painting the Prospect 23

Gainsborough Shuts up his Landscapes

The Eidophusikon

Paul Sandby's Journey to the Fag End of Creation

The Last Bard

Burke and the Sublime

William Gilpin is Correctly Picturesque

The Rules of Beauty

Tintern

The Wrong Kind of Ruin

Chapter 3 A Fitting Landscape 37

Unconscious Imprints

The North Norfolk Coast

The Magnificence of Northumberland

To Agitius, Three Times Consul

The Groans of the Britons

A Sublime Shift

Chapter 4 'I Should Paint My Own Places Best' 47

Consequences of the War with France

John Constable and the Banks of the Stour

A Landscape Abounding in Human Associations

The Chiar'oscuro of Nature

Spring. East Bergholt Common, Hail Squalls. Noon

Constable Lectures to the Literary and Scientific Society of Hampstead

Richard Wilson

The Neglect of a Tasteless Public

Llyn Cau

Chapter 5 The Highlands 59

Wester Ross

Loch Carron

How Rain Remakes a Landscape

Waterfall Songs

White Noise

Black Peaks

Falls of the Clyde

Turner's Liber Studiorum

The Ghosts that Live in a Landscape

The Delight of Melancholy

The Sound of Raasay

Chapter 6 Making the Journey 69

To the Sea

Dark Waters at the Goultrop Roads

Slowing Down Speed

A Landscape of Ritual

Hugeous Stones

Cornelius Varley Watches Clouds

Chapter 7 Heavenly Hafod 79

Thomas Johnes's Dream

A Frenzy of Larch

The Correctly Educated Traveller

A Derby Dessert Service

Spending Three Fortunes

From Bog to Pasture

Intractable Tenants

Model Cheeses

An Earthly Eden

Part 2 Prospects and the Plough

Chapter 8 The Board Of Agriculture 93

A Different Way of Looking

Process Not Product

William Marshall's Rural Economies

ArthurYoung on the Hoof

The General Views

Cultivated Land and a Civilised Society

Ploughs Too Bad for Description

The Improvers

George Kay Has a Hard Time

A Patriotic Duty

The Landscape of Lancashire's Mills

Marshall's AU-Seeing Eye

Chapter 9 William Cobbett 109

The First Rural Ride

A Splenetic Guide

The Creep of the Wen

Nice Sweet Fuel

A Man Who Speaks and Thinks Plain

The Speenhamland System

Radical Swedes

The Superiority of Woodland Counties

The Supremacy of Ash

Happy Hampshire

Chapter 10 Of Rooks and Sheep 123

Birds in Flight

A Clamour of Rooks

Animating the Landscape

Roosts

Sheep Shape

Sheep

Leazes and Water Meadows

The Importance of Folding

Hurdles and Hazel

Robert Bakewell's Two Pounder

A Testing Time for Rams

Chapter 11 Common Land 141

Estover, Turbary and Pannage

The Commons Preservation Society

Searching for a Model Management Scheme

Biodiversity or Access; What Do We Want?

The Difficulty of Understanding the Plot

Chapter 12 Landscape and Farmers 151

Maps

Local Distinctiveness

A Landscape of Bureaucracy

Domesday

Surveying the Country

Pigs or Poppies

Shaping the Land

Hedges Old and New

The Bully Boys

A Sanitised Masquerade

Chapter 13 Dressing the Skeleton 167

Naming Places

Geological Imperatives

Hoskins's Golden Age

Enclosures

'Disbeautifying an Enchanting Piece of Scenery'

Our Richest Historical Record

Part 3 Prospects and Place

Chapter 14 A Particular Patch 177

Celtic Hill Forts

Singularities of Landscape

Jewels to Gather

An Inexorable Timetable

Protecting the Landscape?

Putting Golf First

Evensong

John Gale's Virginals

The Powerstock Tithe Map

Puzzicks and Flinty Nap

Absalom Guppy and the Workhouse

Chapter 15 Thomas Hardy's Wessex 193

Architecture as a Window on the Soul

Stinsford or Westminster Abbey: Where Do You Leave the Flowers?

Water Meadows, the Silver Gridirons

Egdon Heath

The Archetypal Wood

Nature's Indifference

A Blizzard from a Bright Blue Sky

Chapter 16 What Does Landscape Offer? 203

A Prospect

An Occupation

Predisposition

Contemplating a Quiet View

Marks Made and Rubbed Out

Time Measured by Different Clocks

Michaelmas Ancient Bones

A Morning in May

Lighting Up the Landscape

A Pedigree Bull

Hefted to the Hills

Ending A Funeral at Llanddewi Rhjdderch - The Glittering Valley 217

Notes 221

Bibliography 233

Acknowledgements 239

List of Illustrations 241

Index 243

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