“Took a walk in the fields saw an old wood stile taken away from a favourite spot which it had occupied all my life the posts were overgrown with ivy and it seemed so akin to nature and the spot where it stood as though it had taken it on lease for an undisturbed existence it hurt me to see it was gone for my affections claim a friendship with such things…”
John Clare’s ‘Journal’, September 1824
Citation
I am told that institutions have their own protocols but it is usually
Name of Author; Title of work from Titlepage: Publisher; Place of Publication, date.
I am also advised to attach a short description of each in under 25 words, to help later, for there is nothing more tedious than requisitioning books you once had in your hands, and checking which page you saw the information on. So, keep page references scrupulously.
And above all with references, I’ll attempt to be discriminating as to what I find most useful. Remembering these references are useful in helping others to understand where I’m going, but are there to be mined on a selective and personal basis. I am aware of non-visual people trying to lure me onto the standard Humanist word-based traditional territory of debate.
The Pathetic Fallacy, that Landscape mirrors the internal sensibility is apparently very common, but I intend to read John Ruskin (who was a fierce critic against it), preferring a scientific approach to Landscape. Generating unspecific landscapes, I must remember the 18th century Blot method of Alexander Cozens – mountains and valleys seen in blots, not recorded by the artist.
Booklist
Booklist: Landscape
William Vaughan, Helmut Borsch-Supan, Hans Joachim Neidhardt, Caspar David Friedrich, 1774-1840; Romantic Landscape Painting in Dresden, Tate Gallery 1972
Leslie Parris, Landscape in Britain, 1750-1850, Tate Gallery 1973
E.H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images, Studies in the Art of Renaissance, Phaidon 1975
Booklist: Liminal
Patrick Keiller, The Possibility of Life’s Survival on the Planet, Tate Publishing, 2012
Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, Arcadia for All, The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape, Five Leaves, 2004
Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking, The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism, Harbour, 2010
Booklist: New Towns (Milton Keynes)
Julian Baggini, Welcome to Everytown, Granta Books, 2008
Booklist: Childhood
Walter de la Mare, Early One Morning, in the Spring; Chapters on Children and on Childhood as it is revealed in particular in Early Memories and in Early Writings, Faber and Faber, 1935
Booklist: Memory
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, Vintage Books, 2002
Yet to be categorised:
Leslie Parris, Landscape in Britain c.1750-1850, The Tate Gallery 1973. ISBN. 0 900874 70 8. Exhibition Catalogue.
Compiled by Geoffrey Grigson, The English Year, from Letters and Diaries. Oxford University Press, 1984
Hartley Kemball Cook, Over the Hills and Far Away, Three Centuries of Holidays. George Allen & Unwin, 1947
Chosen by G. Rostrevor Hamilton & John Arlott, Landmarks: A Book of Topographical Verse for England and Wales, Cambridge at The University Press, 1943. An anthology to present a picture of England and Wales, seen through the eyes of writers of English Verse.
Jerome Blum (ed), Our Forgotten Past, Thames and Hudson London 1982, a selection of essays (CM)
Gillian Darley, Villages of Vision, A Study of Strange Utopias, Five Leaves 2007 (CM)
Ernst Gombrich, Art & Illusion, essay, The Limits of Likeness (Constable) (CM)
John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare, Cambridge University Press, 1972
Geoffrey Grigson, The English Year, Oxford Paperbacks, 19 July 1984
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, various editions: embedding information and impressions in given places, talk this over with Barbara Loftus
Frances Yates, Art and Memory, various editions: a useful place to start because she established a long lost tradition of a role the image had in the functions of memory.
Sam Smiles, Thomas Guest and Paul Nash in Wiltshire: Two Episodes in the Artistic Approach to British Antiquity, TATE Papers:
Nick Papadimitriou, Scarp, Nick Papadimitriou’s website: .
Brian Short, England’s Landscape: The South East
David McRaney, You are Not So Smart: Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself
Alexander J. Bridger, Walking as a ‘Radicalized’ Critical Psychological Method? A Review of Academic, Artistic and Activist Contributions to the Study of Social Environments
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Books 1958 /69
Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams, Faber and Faber 1981/86
Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue, Penguin 1990
Stephen J Gould, Eight Little Piggies, Jonathan Cape 1993
Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Freeman 1977
EV Lucas, Highways and Byways in Sussex, BY FREDERICK L. GRIGGS, MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED, ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON, 1921
England in Particular: A Celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Vernacular and the Distinctive (Hardcover)
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces
Norretranders, T., J. (1999). The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down To Size, 186-87. New York: Penguin Books.
Suzanne Ferguson, Sequences, Anti-Sequences, Cycles, and Composite Novels: The Short Story in Genre Criticism, Journal of the Short Story in English, 41 | Autumn 2003, [Online], Online since 30 juillet 2008. Connection on 01 octobre 2013.
Quotes
“For most of us the ‘way in’ to the countryside close to our homes or in far-away places has been along the footpaths, bridleways and lanes. The disused railway line taking you all the way out of town, the canal towpath, the path from village to village, and the criss-cross of lines, their purpose long forgotten but their pleasures still abundant, all give you the chance to know more closely the corners of your ‘territory’. The paths provide a means of movement but they have many values in their own right. If the scale of the parish ‘feels right’ then the footpath is surely fitted to that scale. The variety it offers underfoot, in taking sheltered routes by the hedges or striking out unashamedly across a field, in meandering through the woods and by the stream, in the details of stile and gate, all are part of that very richness that the locality offers.
A simple line hardly impinging on nature – the path – is the oldest mark to be made upon the landscape by man. History written in a single line – the link with all the feet that have trodden the same trail gives the humble path another significance to us. Those windy tracks across the moors linking village with village and valley with valley, those ridgeway paths to the cider house, ‘deadmans lane’ (the way the coffin was carried to church), the lovers lanes, the smugglers lanes, the path to the gibbet at the edge of the parish – are all part of the rich cultural tapestry of our countryside.
Our pattern of footpaths both illustrates and symbolises rights of passage created by generations of ordinary people going about their everyday business. That footpaths are an inheritance to be cherished simply for their commonplace qualities and because they are everywhere may seem odd – but for those who are landless and for those who care about the whole of the countryside, that intricate network of common paths provides the only vital popular link with land and place. To lose a footpath is to lose an ancient right hard won and to let down both our forbears and our children.”
Sue Clifford and Angela King, founder directors of Common Ground/England in Particular, have stepped down. The new contact is : Adrian Cooper, Common Ground, Lower Dairy, Toller Fratrum, Dorchester, Dorset DT2 0EL. Archives held at Exeter University: Dr Christine Faunch, Head of Heritage Collections