The new open farmland

The latest David Matless has quite a lot to say about English landscape. Some of the things covered in England's Green have been discussed on this blog in the past, including Richard Long, Ghost Box, Roy Fisher, Susan Hiller, The Peregrine, ley lines, The Detectorists, the Green Knight, Andy Goldsworthy, the Fitties, Ground Work, J. G. Ballard, John Fowles, Stonehenge, Electric Eden and rewilding. The book's main chapters veer around from topic to topic, a bit like Some Landscapes but with an organising principle and more specific points to make. They include interesting material on government environmental policy and changing attitudes to farming, set alongside nostalgic references to childhood TV and pop culture, from The Wombles to The Wurzels. Matless is a similar age to me but got exposed to things in Norfolk we had no experience of growing up in Brighton, like agricultural fairs and country dancing!

I'll just highlight one part of the book here to that give a flavour of his approach. A section on 'Today's Country' begins with Camberwick Green, the children't animation in which Windy Miller is a traditional rural figure and Farmer Bell a modern farmer. They are rivals but friends. Matless sees them as embodying different 1960s figures - Windy's values consistent with the emerging counterculture while Bell, 'in no sense a villain', had modern tractors and farm machinery that resembled the Corgy, Dinky and Matchbox models being sold at the time. Farmer Bell's world could also be seen in scale model dioramas on display in places like the Science Museum. This modern farming 'could also claim aesthetic value', as set out in an interesting quote from Nan Fairbrother’s New Lives, New Landscapes (1970):

‘The new open farmland, if we cease to look at it nostalgically, has its own distinctive beauties, its very openness being one ... In large-scale arable farming we are conscious too of the land, the earth itself. We can see the shape of the ground as we never can in small hedged fields, and in our rolling landscapes the modulations of the surface are in themselves beautiful.’

It is hard to imagine anyone writing that now, given the environmental problems that became increasingly apparent with modern agriculture. And yet I have to admit her description partly resonates with how I felt aesthetically about the open, bare hills of the South Downs when I lived in Sussex. Fundamentally though, Fairbrother's idea of 'a land restyled for today' sounds like a depressing prospect, in more ways than one. She suggests that 'fields as we know them will disappear' and future historians will be have to uncover them 'as we now study Celtic lynchets and the open field system at Axholme.' I now have my father's copy of New Lives, New Landscapes (essential reading for a town planner) which he bought in 1972, when I was probably still enjoying Camberwick Green.