Andrew Motion (UK Poet Laureate 1999-2009)
I have long believed the countryside is our greatest communal masterpiece. The value of that phrase, for me, is twofold. Firstly, within it lies the idea that the countryside belongs to all of us, not just to those who materially own it. Secondly it retains the idea of beauty, while being realistic about how this marvellous thing came into being. An innocent eye might look at the English countryside and think that it is natural beauty incarnate but of course, in reality it’s the result of hundreds of years of farming, husbanding, cropping, wood-planting, hedge-building and other human interactions with the land. We appear to be looking at something extremely complex and deliberated something that we, and the people who before us on this particular bit of Earth, have made.
So what makes our countryside and green spaces so valuable? Anyone who has stood in the midst of a beautiful landscape and felt something understands the answer to that, but finding words for it can be difficult. One of my own favourite landscapes is the great beautiful curve of the East Anglian coast as it sweeps up towards Norfolk. For me, the area around Blakeney and Holkham is one of the most beautiful parts of the world. Its loneliness and its liminal quality are undoubtedly part of the charm. If someone asked me what was so special about that landscape, I would respond in a similar way I might if asked what a good person looked like which is to say there are a lot of good things happening at the same time. It has got something to do with shape, it has something to do with sound (or lack of it); listening to natural rather than person-made sound. It has also something to do with time. A great landscape conveys an idea of fixity and transcience in the same blink of an eye. Fixity because that particular place will be more less like that tomorrow; transcience because the day after the day after tomorrow, it may not look quite that so we must pay attention.
In addition to these qualities, when we stand there and feel connected to the land, we are also using it as a king of canvas onto which we paint our own hopes, delights and even perhaps our own fears and disappointments because looking at a landscape can help us cope just as much with those as it can release our delight in things. I think that was what Edmund Burke was talking about when he wrote on the passion, astonishment and terror of the sublime. The countryside exists as a real place, of course and one with many practical uses including feeding and sheltering us but we are also forever transposing onto it the things that are inside us.
Even though eighty per cent of us now live in urban areas, we are fundamentally rural animals. The countryside is where we have come from as a species and our connection with it is absolutely profound and primitive. You need only look at the tremendous richness of environmental and landscape writing at the moment, certainly in the spheres of poetry and non-fiction, to realise what a vital part of our culture it continues to be.
Countryside Voice (Summer 2013) pp10-11