Viewing the view

Landskipping is about viewing the view, from the 18th century to the present. From the title (which is the only self-conscious thing about this terrific book) I feared we might be in for a heavy dose of Wordworthishness and ‘the lone enraptured male’ school of writing. But Anna Pavord, along with Kathleen Jamie, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen, is more down-to-earth than any Romantic moper. Like the author of Sense and Sensibility, she sees both sides of the coin.

Romantic mopers, however, do crowd the early pages. Once a ‘correct’ taste for landscape became a desirable attainment in the mid-18th century, the way you looked at wild places was a way of demonstrating sensibility rather than sense. The practical agricultural reformers only began to assert their influence towards the end of the century; and Pavord, with her Welsh farming background and wide-ranging cultural interests, proves a marvellous observer of both ways of looking at what was once known as the country but now gets called the countryside.

The first part of the book deals with how poets and painters reacted to the awesome sights of mountains and lakes. Wordsworth, who could claim that the sounding cataract haunted him like a passion, was less keen on sharing his rapture with tourists. He preferred to keep the Lake District for himself and those who worked the land. (I have always admired Wordsworth for suggesting that ordinary people were transformed into poets when they reacted to landscape. He called them ‘silent poets’ and explained that ‘Michael’ was written to ‘show that men who did not wear fine clothes can feel deeply’.)

Painters could be as susceptible as poets and Wordsworth’s labourers. Constable wrote that ‘painting is but another word for feeling’. But Sawrey Gilpin thought that nature is ‘seldom so correct in composition as to produce a harmonious whole’, and advised draping rocks with shrubs and hanging herbage to make them more picturesque.