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In our current 'age of preservation',
the landsape is chief among the objects to be preserved.
The opposing processes of change are the expanding,
or new technologies, and increased material needs. The
agents of change bear the guise of property developers,
planners, bureaucrats, or giant corporations. There
is, however, considerable confusion over what it is
that is to be preserved. Is it landscape untouched by
human hands? Is it countryside not much altered in its
appearance by human activity since some point in the
past? In which case what is cut-off date, after which
change is impermissible. Is the landscape to be protected
a purely rural category, a stretch of country inhabited
by not too many people, tastefully disposed in a few
isolated houses of distinction or in small clusters
of lesser dwellings of pleasingly picturesque quality?
Beneath such questions lie deeper confusions in attitudes
towards the processes that created landscapes now thought
to be worthy of conservation. There are also ambiguities
in admiring the relics and remains of past socio- economic
changes, the outcomes of obsolete and dead technologies,
while striving to combat the visible effects of current
developments and technologies.
It may well be that in a hundred years
derelict nuclear power stations will have merged into
the landscape and have acquired admirers and defenders
of their irreplaceable contribution as relict features
of a bygone pioneering age. Certainly one does not have
to look far today to find admirers of railway lines
which were once denounced as raw scars on the scenery,
reservoirs that submerged ancient villages, or mill
chimneys, which were the very fount of atmospheric pollution.
Many of these silent elements have become accepted as
familiar features of the landscape, and hence in some
sense natural parts of the local scene.
Distance of time and memory lends charm
and fascination to many strange objects, as well as
unlikely events. Maybe the general law of landscape
appreciation amounts to little more than the proposition
that yesterday's blot on the landscape is today's beauty
spot. Nostalgia does not in itself explain why certain
scenes, settings, and structures touch nostalgic chords
at certain times. Some are found to be evocative and
admirable, while others remain below the dignity of
landscape status, or if considered at all, excite ridicule
or disgust. However, nostalgia is the touchstone of
landscape sentiment, landscape definition and landscape
conservation.
Familiarity breeds nostalgia and inevitably
much of the frightful, ugly, and regrettable things
our forebears did with, to, and on the land are ignored.
Today's nostalgia, however, is a reminder that anything
done to the land, or erected upon it, necessarily produced
a visible lasting effect on an established scene. Valued
outcomes of change are those that have survived long
enough to trigger the subsequent emotional and artistic
responses needed to make them accepted parts of the
scenery. An explanation of these moods and attitudes
lies in the realms of cultural ecology and the concept
of the aesthetics of visual taste as a social focus
for groups of people.
Land management in the countryside has
three aims; to gain the maximum economic return from
the land; to produce a favourable ecological condition
for wildlife; and to create visual harmony. Each one
of these aims will produce a visual outcome, and the
first approach to landscape analysis is to categorise
the local scene. This is the purpose of the following
tour through the boundary lands of the Blything Hundred.
Click here to access tour
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