Academic literature on the topic 'Villages – England – Cotswold Hills'

This portfolio deals with the work I have been undertaking for the past 20 years. Investigating sense of place at Belas Knap Neolithic long barrow, Cotswolds, England. I have taken an holistic approach in the creation of art that aims to bridge the sensory experience of archaeology, memory and culture. Over the last twenty years I have been responding through my art to place and memory, mapping, interpreting and connecting to the seasonal changes at Belas Knap, a laterally chambered Neolithic long barrow located in the Cotswold Hills, Gloucestershire, South West England (NGR: SP0209 2554).

AbstractThis paper reports the discovery of an in-situ striated, far-travelled, oversized clast in the Ardleigh Gravels of the Kesgrave Sands and Gravels of the River Thames at Ardleigh, east of Colchester in Essex, eastern England. The morphology, petrography and geochemistry of the clast, and the sedimentology of the host deposit are described. The striations are interpreted, on the basis of their sub-parallelism and the shape and sub-roundedness of the clast, as glacial and the clast is provenanced to Ordovician rocks of the Llŷn and Snowdonia regions of North Wales. On the basis of clast frequency within the Colchester Formation gravels of the Kesgrave Sands and Gravels it is inferred that glaciers reached the Cotswold region of the Thames catchment. Floe-ice transport during spring flood is invoked for movement from the glaciated region to eastern England. The paper discusses the possible age of the glaciation and recognises that it is difficult to be more precise than a cold stage in the early Middle Pleistocene (MIS 18, 16 or 14). Attention is drawn to the possibility of glaciation associated with a diamicton in the region of the Cotswold Hills known as the Bruern Till, but stresses the need for new work on this deposit.

The article analyzes the legal status and economic condition of the cities of Galicia as part of the Austrian Empire (1772–1867). It is noted that urban planning activity is traditionally determined by several factors that influence the form and nature of the development of urban settlements. First, it is a factor of natural conditions – the influence of climate, geographical and topographical position, geological conditions, relief. Secondly, it is an economic factor – conditions that contribute to the development of the economy and trade, including the availability of natural resources. Thirdly, it is a security (military) factor – the ability to protect life and property during potential wars (historically, this factor was often associated with favorable natural conditions – hills, swamps, river basins). Fourthly, it is a communication factor – connection with other cities, location on trade routes. Fifth, the factor of urban composition is the conscious creation of the form and structure of the city; activity of the urban planner. Sixth, the legal factor is a set of regulatory acts that regulate the organization of the city, development both from a spatial (location) and social point of view (this factor is at the center of our research). These factors are universal in nature and operate regardless of country or culture.It has been established that urban development activity was determined by the owners of the cities: some of the owners sought to demonstrate their wealth and success. The city, which functioned effectively, was distinguished by its appearance on the landscape. However, the functioning of cities did not go beyond the model of the functioning of feudalism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this regard, it is worth quoting the words of tycoon Jan Zamoyski: “Cities flourish in Western Europe, because the city-state has great rights there. But since this splendor comes at the expense of noble liberty, I prefer not to have it at such a price. People’s happiness is judged not by crafts, not by walls and large buildings, which we do not lack.” This quotation well characterizes the role of private cities in the urban network of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th and 17th centuries.Urbanization on the territory of Galicia as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth differed from that of Western Europe in that it was not a matter of the central government, but mainly of private initiative. Royal foundations were rare in Poland in the 17th and 18th centuries. As a result, the share of private cities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth increased in the 17th–18th centuries. to about two-thirds. Private cities also existed in other European countries, such as in Germany, France and England, but nowhere were they as dominant as in Poland. This specific aspect of Polish urbanization played a major role in shaping the ethnic and religious structure of cities. Poles and Jews made up the majority of the inhabitants of cities and towns, while Ukrainians were mostly peasants and lived in villages and city suburbs.

Abstract This article re-examines the place of the Middle Ages in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English culture. In doing so, it presents an argument about the interrelationship of landscape, history and English national identity. Emphasising the importance of the medieval past to mainstream constructions of Englishness, the article shows how this importance largely derived from the felt presence of the Middle Ages in the physical environment, in the landscape of England. Their history congealed in the fields, forests, hills, towns and villages of the present day, the Middle Ages were readily accessible through imaginative agency and possessed of vital contemporary meaning. Embodied experience of landscape offered Victorians and Edwardians compelling evidence of the long continuities of English national history, from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. In an increasingly democratic context, the medieval presence in the landscape was evidence of the continuity not only of the institutions of the realm, but of the English people themselves. Until at least the First World War, and perhaps beyond, the tangible heritage of the Middle Ages in the English landscape served as an important source of reassurance of the nation’s endurance and progress, amid the transformations of modernity.

When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. London: Collins, 1942.Brannigan, John. “‘England Am I …’ Eugenics, Devolution and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” The Palgrave Macmillan Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature. Eds. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Cannadine, David. In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2002.Cavaliero, Glen. The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900-1939. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Ford, Ford Madox. The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land. London: Alston Rivers, 1906.Gervais, David. Literary Englands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Giles, J., and T. Middleton, eds. Writing Englishness. London: Routledge, 1995.Haddow, Elizabeth. “The Novel of English Country Life, 1900-1930.” Dissertation. London: University of London, 1957.Hamilton, Robert. W.H. Hudson: The Vision of Earth. New York: Kennikat Press, 1946.Keith, W.J. Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965.Lewis, Roy, and Angus Maude. The English Middle Classes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998.Morris, Margaret. The General Strike. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Morton, H.V. In Search of England. London: Methuen, 1927.Peach, H. Let Us Tidy Up. Leicester: The Dryad Press, 1930.Perry, C.R. “In Search of H.V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy.” Twentieth Century British History 10.4 (1999): 431-56.Roberts, Cecil. Pilgrim Cottage. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933.———. Gone Rustic. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934.Taylor, A.J.P. England 1914-1945. The Oxford History of England XV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Taylor, John. War Photography: Realism in the British Press. London: Routledge, 1991.Wiener, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Williamson, Henry. The Village Book. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.Wright, Patrick. A Journey through Ruins: A Keyhole Portrait of British Postwar Life and Culture. London: Flamingo, 1992.

Scarp and Vale' topography is typified by the Cotswolds region with the present-day landscape being the aggregate of earlier tectonic movement and surface processes. The primary aim of this thesis is to disentangle these landscape components, the .feedbacks between them and their driving mechanisms. Modelling suggests that flexure, in response to denudational unloading, may account for ~35% of local Pleistocene relief. Shape-fitting, between the model and landscape observations, shows the local lithosphere to be relatively weak and the uplift to be spatially varying. River longitudinal profiles adjust to extrinsic variables, such as tectonic movement, base level change and climate fluctuation. Parametrisation of 66 Cotswold draining rivers revealed trends, in their concavity and steepness index, consistent with those of the modelled uplift. Similar trends were sought from geomorphic analysis of the fluvial sinuosity and basin hypsometry. There is a morphological control to channel sinuosity as it is found to be dependent upon flow orientation. A positive relationship is observed. between hypsometric integral and proposed uplift, for the dip-slope basins. The accumulated geomorphic evidence does not prove the flexure modelling results, however, they are consistent with it. Viscoelastic modelling calculates the rate of lithospheric relaxation. It predicts high ' initial uplift rates which decrease rapidly and the attainment of topographic equilibrium within ~2o-50 ka of unloading. This is significantly lower than the climate cycle duration of 100 ka. Linking this result with a terrace aggradation and incision model, a schematic model of landscape evolution is produced. This incorporates the regional background uplift, a fluctuating climate, and episodic incision to which there is a flexural feedback. It is concluded that the Pleistocene has experienced a number of 'incision - flexural uplift aggradation' cycles controlled temporally by the fluctuating climate.

Formal agricultural education in England came into existence with the opening of the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, Gloucestershire in 1845. For many years, it remained the sole agricultural college in the country. This begs the questions why was it created at this time, and in this place? Why was its example not widely copied? The original intention of the founders was to provide agricultural education for the sons of working farmers in the Cotswolds, but this could not be sustained, and the target group and the catchment area were soon changed. What brought about these changes? In seeking answers to these, and other questions, the key role of a single individual, R. J. Brown, is examined. He was acknowledged as the originator of the plan to create an agricultural college. Having no English precedent, Brown looked abroad for models, on which to base his proposals and arguments. Some of the models he chose are examined for possible sources of inspiration and influence. The roles of other individuals and groups involved in the development of the Royal Agricultural College are explored. Attention is given to the fact that the College, which became a national institution, was launched by a local Farmer's Club, at a time when local and county Agricultural Societies were flourishing and the Royal Agricultural Society of England had been in existence for seven years. Brown was not the only individual to outline proposals for establishing an agricultural college. Two similarcontemporary schemes, for Kent and for Yorkshire are included for comparison, both of which failed. The foundation of the Royal Agricultural College in England is seen as part of a diffusion process starting with the pioneering work in formal agricultural education in Switzerland and Germany and its gradual spread that included the creation of establishments at Templemoyle in Northern Ireland and at Grignon in France. The creation of the Royal Agricultural College is regarded as an innovation, the result of a directed social programme, with Brown as the change agent. Use is made of Beal1s Construct of Social Action to discuss the process of the development of the Royal Agricultural College and the start of formal agricultural education in England. A retrospective view from 1907 of the achievements of the Royal Agricultural College is attempted, in the light of the evidence offered by the Principal of that time

There has been a long-standing tendency to divide Roman Britain into just two regions. This simplistic view goes back toHaverfield’s (1912) ‘civil’ and ‘military’ districts, and Fox’s (1932) ‘lowland’ and ‘upland’ zones, and the persistence of these binary characterizations contributes to the impression of homogeneity in Romano-British landscape character (Collingwood 1930; Frere 1967; Salway 1981, 4–5). Dark and Dark’s (1997) substitution of the term ‘villa landscape’ for ‘civil zone’, and ‘native landscape’ for ‘military zone’, simply reinforces this over-simplification. While there have been many discussions of local distinctiveness within the Romano-British landscape, this has all too often been within the context of modern counties (e.g. papers in Thomas 1966a), and Taylor’s (2007a) use of twenty-first century units of regional government was no better (his ‘South East’ region, for example, stretches from Kent to the foot of the Cotswold Hills and embraced regions of very different character in the Roman period). In An Imperial Possession Mattingly (2006) moves the debate on a long way, in discussing how three ‘communities’—military, civil (urban), and rural—interacted with each other in different regions, although his 621-page book, which is so rich in ideas, contains just fifteen very small-scale maps, reflecting how our understanding of regional variation in landscape character is not as well advanced as it is for the medieval period. The need to improve our understanding of regionality within Romano-British society across eastern England has recently been highlighted as a priority in the Research Framework for this region (Medlycott 2011b, 47); the following three chapters will hopefully go some way towards achieving that. The Roman Conquest brought about a transformation of lowland Britain as it was progressively drawn into the Roman world. One effect of this is an archaeological record that appears, at first sight, remarkably homogeneous, with the landscape apparently characterized by towns and villas, the economy seemingly dominated by market-based trade, and material culture increasingly using a relatively uniform repertoire of forms.

Later in the period, more realistic views of the countryside began to emerge, with concern to protect open spaces and see farming as an endangered industry, not a pleasing spectacle. Writers reflected these changes with less idealistic views. Francis Brett Young’s Portrait of a Village did this, but its illustrations by Joan Hassall continued the romanticised approach. William Beach Thomas is forward-looking in The English Countryside, with more contemporary photographs and even the discussion of national parks. Yet even here there is a yearning for the older village and its traditions. The chapter ends with a discussion of the vocabulary of country writing, with villages that ‘nestle’ in hills, and vistas that are ‘charming’, ‘graceful’, all seen from a sentimental distance. Propaganda films of 1939 return to similar imagery: all contrast sharply with the directness of writing about the ruined villages of Belgium and France.