SHARED LANDSCAPES
The simple fact of a unified landscape one might like to consider representative of an historic
record, a unique trust and identity as of our own.
Landscape as our most significant and sustainable resource, efficient not only in integrating
and sustaining land uses but also for indicating areas for improvements and investment.
Should we ever need otherwise to contemplate landscape.
Few things seem capable of inspiring in us awe to the same extent as landscape.
For perhaps most of us the landscape has intrinsic ecological and socio cultural values that
stimulate and help broaden our perspectives and open our thoughts and levels of discernment.
Evident and defining even soaring character often seems available in very few other instances.
We appreciate unique thoughts and character in the qualities of a landscape even of relatively
intangible elements supportive of our open mindedness and receptive sensibilities.
Landscape has timeless qualities and associations for us.
Only through a positive, broad appreciation and evident supportive association can we fully
define and support landscapes, especially the contribution they make in how we discern
personal environments and commitments.
Landscapes give us an appreciation of time and space, not least in which to think, one reason
why we invest to raise our levels of discernment and opinion.
Attempting to alter, de-sensitise or change the equilibrium of such evident character risks
alienating trust on a significant scale, rarely to be ignored or forgotten. Indeed, landscape
represents a quality of shared approval that can be far more significant than initially appreciated.
Qualities of landscape often seem best viewed in terms of equilibrium.
Extensive land forms need defining subtly in terms of a natural balance of features, of evident
groupings of topography and characteristics particularly in cloud conditions and light which can
so radically enhance, affect and segment our ability to see through views, particularly over distances.
Where elevation is so often a key element in our perception of panoramas the protection of their
full significance and surrounds in landscape requires our utmost concern. No one indeed may own
a view independent of the land but we and future generations can inspire ourselves to uphold such
evident integrity in all its proportions and unique historic significance.
Landscapes are issues of renowned quality able to inspire us artistically as well as in feelings and
emotions of appreciating nature.
There seems something vital in our assumption of our ability to interact meaningfully with landscapes,
nature and environment. Their latent quality is with us always, alone our responsibility and heritage.
Landscape can be of specific, spectacular and of unusual quality, a defining sensory, cultural and
ecological climax on various scales from the blue isoprene haze of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the
Appalachians to the dramatic isolated ascent of the Malverns on the Severn Plain.
Viewed from a different but no less valuable perspective of microcosm the handful of villages
below the northern Cotswold outcrop of Bredon are within the palm of your hand, each village with
its medieval stone church seemingly within throwing distance of each another. This is a spectacular
definition of life and landscape in an intrinsic microcosm, if not exclusively of a personal one, a
composure resonating in the closeness of time and tranquility.
Views are all about potentials.
We innately discern the strengths, balance, segments and frameworks of views. We invest views with
our own appreciation of their significance and intrinsic values, our landscapes in ourselves. We can
rightly feel part their historic continuity, relevance and appreciation.
For each of us as individuals our landscapes are uniquely personal.
Some views are obviously spectacular, independent in their scale and significance of features.
Views though do too often become meaningless in terms of their vision for us, of diminished scale and
stature if they are eroded by development unrelated to material and production from the land. Literally
filling in a landscape is never supportable and risks this being appreciated as irreversible and irrelevant,
an unsupportable trend for future landscapes.
We literally look beyond landscapes and panoramas to appreciate their full 'fitting' and creation of
unique scales of significance, not least to our own wider knowledge, appreciation and deemed
obligation for investing surrounding landscape cultures with equally unique integral identities.
Just as landscape is independent in its uniqueness it gives our encouragement to an independent frame
of mind and thought, of being free to think, live and openly speak our minds. Few might disagree that
our place in the landscape is of incomparable significance to us, inspirational even evocative, helping
us to define our contexts, our belonging, our cultural heritage. Each of us has our place in the landscape.
It is one of very few sounding boards that gives us a very real sense of perception of something
inherently valuable. Even the towers and spires of cathedrals seem set to inspire us through landscapes.
But the sheer extent of modern urban development vies for visual significance with landscape, competing
and confronting in mass, scale, spread and sprawl. It and ourselves seek to impose and replace rather
than to reflect significance and complement potential in landscape.
In historic landscapes we are appreciating qualities of place of such sustained efficiencies and visual
integrities which modern development processes simply do not seem capable of ascertaining, instead
ignoring and replacing their significance where they have none themselves.
We assume that even our most ubiquitous plans can be seen on the ground.
But most seem gratuitously restrictive overtly concealing overlaid, unrecognisable cumulative effects for
which inconceivably we have no consideration of spread, sprawl, massing, scale, place or character,
extending instead an anonymous disorientation to all in which we can not even find directions.
The comprehensive scale of modern urban development means that such now comes ‘gift wrapped’ not
consistently worked, honed and enhanced, the classic acknowledgement of landscape and settlement quality, while modern development character and design has long since left little flexible space for us.
It takes a certain amount of in built spatial flexibility and investment to mitigate the effects of development
through inclusive constraints on sterile standardisation and stereotypes grouping, rarely though if ever
evident and since not being seen in terms of economic factors neither are ecology nor landscape
involved or included.
The term estate is now purely descriptive, defined in diminution, demeaned in definition.
Urban intrusion in landscape is no longer incremental. It openly replaces the character even of world
famous panoramic views.
The Birdlip Escarpment over the Severn Plain to the Black Mountain of Wales, the residence of the
Spanish composer Falla over the Grenada Plain choose what you will there are innumerable examples
of famous landscapes simply and literally being filled in by machines. To think that we are protecting
these is in all sincerity likely to mean acknowledging that we have now reached the point where we
recognise that we have already destroyed their fullest significance, integrity and identity and with it
undoubtedly much of our own.
Our landscape once gone can not be reinvested in those same unique circumstances of qualities and
constraints and without very substantial hinterlands one can not hope to reinstate the same degree of
landscape infrastructure and integration previously extant.
Consistent erosion to landscape has long since gone beyond the point where this can be meaningfully
restored or improved and continues the more so, a situation that seems to be accepted, however
reluctantly, as a common state of affairs.
The scale of urban change in the landscape is and has been openly replacing the character of our landscape.
We are unable and unwilling even to measure it effectively.
But few things can be as disappointing and regretted as much as in reflecting upon a demeaned landscape.
Do we really accept living purely within industrial parameters, of accepting everything as factors of
consumption?
We may think we live in a post industrial society but surely not.
Most of us have seen development in the landscape that is not just jarring to our sensibilities but irreversible.
Landscape, though, is and should be a dominant theme and unity. We should have it no other way.
We know it has to be significant as a large and primary resource and that we need to consider it in the
raw. The best parts of a landscape seem to knit together positively to emphasise their integration with the
land.
We inherently seem to appreciate it should not be made to suffer invasive damage, that it should be
respected.
Is landscape simply to be effectively isolated? Even such as those stock proof, shelter giving, cleared
stone, grass earthed field walls of Pembrokeshire spaced up around their rock outcrops that have left
us peaceful harmonies withstanding millenia. We appreciate their relevance and economics in a hard life,
their contribution being made to future generations in looking after the land.
Any erosion of these hard won unified features we know to be simply destructive.
The landscape continues to leave its mark and efficiacy on us, an article of faith for future generations.
Most landscapes seem to hold for us an association of positive beneficial assurances.
A landscape though is not fixed, immutable. One reason why we instinctively value it so highly is that it
seems so perilously close to becoming a transient resource constantly changing while possessing the
sensitivity we appreciate as a work of art.
Indeed landscape has unique qualities, a contemplation of a much more settled and measured pace of life,
a link to rural activity and a natural rythmn of life. What, for instance, could surpass the view above
Wordsworth’s cottage over Grasmere, a timeless idyll reflecting stone built farmhouses framed in pastoral
summer haze.
We need to think more about landscape.
A landscape is sublime and our setting in it enables us to contemplate and expand our vision.
Sharing landscape is enjoyable.
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