tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19151341.post5788076962135439344..comments2024-03-16T16:12:13.296+00:00Comments on some LANDSCAPES: The True LinePliniushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06529481330530614513noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19151341.post-18754068583196159072007-10-21T16:44:00.000+01:002007-10-21T16:44:00.000+01:00As someone who was taught geography at universit...As someone who was taught geography at university in the days of the ‘charming relics from before the quantitative revolution and rise of critical geography’ and who was taught by Hutchings’ co-author, S W Wooldridge, I was very interested in your blog. But in those Golden Days before the sterile detour into mathematical geography, we students did not look on the drawings of Hutchings, or indeed Monkhouse’s illustrations to his standard text book, Maps and Diagrams, as anything but ways of demonstrating more clearly the background to geomorphology and geology. They were not seen as works of art. When we explored the Mole Valley from the Field Studies Centre at Juniper Hill, near Box Hill, we used their techniques to map the river terraces and show where the river went underground. But even then I wondered, and I still do, whether the knowledge imparted by these drawings and illustrations really helped one to appreciate the landscape more aesthetically. A nick point might mark the beginning of a subsidiary valley and an anticline might be explain the way in which the scarps and dip slopes were aligned, but did this make them any more beautiful. <BR/><BR/>However, there were hidden features which did inspire me and still do. Standing in the Surrey Hills, Professor Wooldridge explained that if you poured the contents of a bottle of stout ‘just there’, then half of it would end up in the North Sea and the other half in the English Channel as we were positioned on the watershed. I recall vividly remembering this when I stood with my son on the Rhine/Rhone watershed in Switzerland knowing that water spilt there would end up in the North Sea but also the Mediterranean. When the Prof made his statement, one of the more hearty students remarked that it would have been a waste of stout. I wonder what happened to him?snarlersonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13117760284163716428noreply@blogger.com