When it comes to the British countryside, we don’t know which way to turn.
In the 17th Century it was something we feared – a chaotic, violent place where Nature, red in tooth & claw, vied for a taste of your blood with bandits, highwaymen, smugglers, murderers and the clinically befuddled. Mention the countryside to Thomas Hardy and he would flinch, mutter something about accursed heaths and reach for a quill. One did not tarry long abroad after dark.
Two centuries later, we can’t get enough of it. Red has turned to green. We yearn for slightly (only slightly) overgrown hedgerows and the susurration of sunlit leaves overhead. We salivate over delightfully quaint villages embedded in the side of hills like raisins in a plum duff. We long to hear someone say “ooh arrr”. Warm beer, nuns on bikes, little stone bridges only negotiable if you turn sideways-on. Grassy meadows – as if, left to her own devices, Mother Earth would render the whole world suitable for cricket with the minimum of tending. In short, a primal yet civilized refuge from the dull churning of modern life.
Neither view is correct or even fair, but that’s not the point.
