Keywords

3.1 Introduction

This chapter focuses upon how people think about places, or to be more precise, how from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people took more notice of the landscapes that surrounded them and were motivated to investigate them, discover them and above all sensed them (Hess, 2012). This is really a story about embodiment, about developing a sense of place and engaging with it through all the human senses. We can adopt here a philosophical term, and label this a phenomenological approach, a break from the Enlightenment-inspired Cartesian separation of mind and body (for a classic exposition of the idea see Bachelard, 1957; Merleau-Ponty, 1945). In short (and overlooking a great deal of philosophical and theoretical nuance), this idea posits that rather than wandering around space as an automaton, space/place reacts upon the body and the body reacts to space/place. It is a two-way relationship. As we shall see the phenomenological perspective allows for an interesting and provocative perspective on the relationship between people and places, emphasising the interplay of sense, movement and emotions (e.g. Taun, 1974 [1990]). Having accepted that there is an important, subtle, complex and fluid two-way relationship between people and place, it is axiomatic that people would feel the need to conserve and protect such places. This is why we have protected areas in all their diverse iterations.

The concept of managing natural landscapes in the UK has deep historical roots, although the accent has not always been on the appreciation of landscapes for their aesthetic and environmental meanings, nor indeed the notion that they should be widely accessible (for broad overviews see inter alia Crane, 2016: 273ff; Davies, 1996; Hoskins, 1955; Johnson, 2007; Millman, 1975; Rackham, 2020). If we were to take a view of medieval England for a start, we would see primarily feudal economic interests at work. Examples would include medieval urban burgage plots and rural tenures, parcels of land which carried monetary or service-based obligations within the feudal system and which have their roots in Anglo-Saxon defensive systems (Baker & Brookes, 2013). Here, the landscape was seen very much in terms as a mirror of the social order and an economic resource first and foremost, but perhaps some form of elemental and numinous belief in the power of place survived. The Anglo Saxons certainly felt fear and superstition about certain places within their landscapes (Semple, 2013). Of course, the Christian world view, hierarchical and structured, was all pervading and this governed perceptions of the environment and natural world. But this presupposes an old-fashioned structural dichotomy between nature and culture. In reality the concepts elide, and the so-called natural landscape could be controlled and enculturated (managed, in fact).

Royal forests (such as the New Forest) were maintained primarily (as the French meaning of the word implies) as landscapes for hunting, solely by the King and aristocracy, and access to such lands, as well as severe penalties for crimes such as poaching there could be enacted (Hooke, 2011; Young, 1978, 1979). People who lived in these areas, however, could be granted certain rights, such as pannage, for example, (allowing pigs to graze in areas of the forest) and Verderers Courts in the New Forest (Hants. UK) and Forest of Dean (Glos. UK) preserve today these ancient forms of land management. All the while through the later medieval period agricultural technologies developed and resources such as meat, crops and wool contributed to the wealth of southern and midland England in particular. Can we speak of a medieval environmental movement? In a sense protection of the natural world was something that was very much a concern of the elites, but not for the purposes of aesthetics, or indeed free access and social justice. The British and European landscapes of this period were hierarchical and controlled. We live with these legacies of ownership and control of access today (Hayes, 2020).

We can add in too the historical issues around common land and enclosure, and a general trend to a seizure of control of the countryside from the eighteenth century, with very little attempt to address the rights of non-land owning people (Wordie, 1983). Another dimension of economic land management prevalent up until the time of the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s by King Henry VIII, were the vast tracts of land held by monastic houses, such as Glastonbury and Westminster, as well as land held more generally by the Church. These lands were either absorbed by the Crown or transferred into the ownership of the Church of England (Heldring et al., 2021). Early religious-educational establishments such as the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and their constituent colleges also established large estates and land holdings, along with the aristocracy. This Enlightenment conception of control extended to landscape, not just in terms of ownership, but physical manipulation of space, evidenced, for example, in the popularity of formalised and ordered gardens which were so popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and themselves expressions of nascent capitalist ideologies (e.g. Leone et al., 2005).

By the time we reach the start of the nineteenth-century land management in England was even more in the hands of the elites and these rich agricultural and industrial holdings (discoveries of coal, e.g., could be very lucrative at the start of the Industrial Revolution) contributed to many fortunes. Factor in land holdings elsewhere in the Empire, particularly the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, and we can see the economic importance of landscape in maintaining the position of the wealthy elites. This is a very broad brush approach to a lot of history around the management of natural landscapes in England, and of course limitations on word counts prohibit a nuanced consideration of the wider picture in the British Isles and the rest of northern Europe, but it brings us to the starting point for this chapter: the artistic and cultural collision of nostalgia, aesthetics and anti-Enlightenment thinking that defines one of the major cultural currents of the late eighteenth–early twentieth century: the Romantic movement (Blanning, 2011).

This chapter does not seek to outline the history of the Romantic movement, but rather to see how the vision of romantically influenced writers, poets and painters influenced nineteenth-century thinking about natural landscapes and how they should, in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution and increasing urbanisation, be conserved and managed for the benefit of all. Our analysis takes us primarily through England, and the background to the emergence of the National Trust in 1895, but will also touch upon the contribution of Henry Thoreau in the United States and German writers and painters of the nineteenth century whose identity was not framed in terms of a nation state (Germany did not exist as a unified political phenomenon until 1871) but in terms of Volkish (folk) attachment to landscape, culture and language, as well as wider European approaches (e.g. Cosgrove, 2017).

3.2 Romanticism and Natural Places: A Global View

The etymology of the term ‘Romantic’ refers primarily to the Romance languages and inheritors of the cultures of ancient Rome (Ferber, 2010, 4–5). The word acquires its current meaning within the context of heroic medieval literary ‘romances’, and from the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries is broadly conceived of a movement that if not quite taking on anti-Enlightenment attitudes (Ferber, 2010, 15), certainly critiques the ideas of science, certainty and rationalism. The Romantic movement, then, in wider terms is characterised by an emphasis on human-nature relations, the power of the natural world and its ability to provoke fear through being ‘sublime’ (Ferber, 2010, 72). The emphasis is thus on the primeval, the atavistic, and as Simon Schama has demonstrated in his 1995 important survey Landscape and Memory a focus on wild places, particularly mountains, lakes and deep forests such as ‘the psychology of Gothic geology…brutally jagged rock pinnacles and unfathomably deep ravines’ (Schama, 1995, 453).

The Romantic ethos is thus idealistic and emphasising human sensibility, here in the context of landscape, the triumph of human emotion and sympathy over reason. Natural landscapes provoke feelings of fear and beauty in us, and the reading of landscape takes on a more phenomenological and embodied turn. The celebration of the natural world is very much part of the Romantic position. From the eighteenth century with the popularity of the Grand Tour, the celebration of raw Alpine landscapes and southwards, contemplating the ruins of Roman civilisation became popular antiquarian pursuits. The Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) records his impressions of crossing the Alps on foot in his Confessions (1781–1788), and soon he was followed by other writers, poets and artists who placed the Alps as the ideal Romantic landscape: wild, uncontrollable and primal (Barsham & Hitchcock, 2012; Scaramellini, 1996).

As the Napoleonic Wars closed off access to the European Alps in the early nineteenth century, English writers such as William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and Robert Southey (1774–1843) gathered in the English Lakeland and celebrated the landscapes there through poetry. A particular segment of verse from Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Prelude’ first published in 1799 records the act of taking a boat and captures well the feeling of the sublime. He looks up at a mountain by the lake in the darkness and:

Growing still in stature, the huge cliff, rose up between me and the stars, and still, with measured motion, like a living thing, strode after me.

Wordsworth in particular had an almost mystical attachment to landscape, covering prodigious distances on foot (Coverley, 2012, 101–109; Solnit, 2014, 104–117). The act of walking for him was a metaphysical engagement with the natural landscape, as it was albeit in an urban context for another contemporary Romantic visionary, William Blake. We can also ascertain this fixation of walking from the writings of Coleridge and another contemporary, William Hazlitt (1778–1830). Wordsworth was also probably the first to articulate the idea of management of natural landscapes for the good of the wider public, seeing the wider Lake District as a ‘sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’ (Wordsworth, 1835, 88). The act of walking, an embodied engagement with place, opened up these possibilities (Hall, 2014; Nichols, 2011).

In his overview of the work of the twentieth-century landscape historian W. G. Hoskins, the historical archaeologist Matthew Johnson starts his analysis with Wordsworth and his relationship with the landscape of the Lake District. Johnson defines the following themes which characterise Wordsworth’s understanding of his landscape, and by extension those of the wider Romantic circle (Johnson, 2007, 25). For Johnson, Wordsworth’s landscapes are (a) experienced in solitude; (b) viewed (‘gazed’) from above; (c) are rooted in aesthetics; (d) are translated into text (in this case his poetry, but also his guidebook to the Lakes); (e) embrace the spirit of place, the genius loci as well as representing ‘Englishness’; (f) the landscape was saturated with traces of the past (in Johnson’s words, ‘travelling backwards’); (g) he engaged with it through the act of walking (a theme we return to again in this chapter); (h) this walking was an intuitive and embodied process; (i) the familiarity with the landscape was a process of many years’ of training and finally (j) there is the implication that this means of engaging with landscape is socially restricted.

It was not just writers engaging with landscape. Romantic painters too sought to visually capture the fearsome and emotional qualities of the natural landscape. The term ‘landscape’ derives from a Dutch word, Landschap (meaning region, or area), and arrives in English during the sixteenth century primarily as an artistic term (Schama, 1995, 10), but Dutch landscape paintings of the sixteenth–seventeenth century were rigidly formal and realistic topographical executions, and in any case, the vogue for painting at this time was more towards heroic and mythological scenes and portraiture (Andrews, 1999, 129). A German painter, Casper David Friedrich (1744–1840), broke this mould with his 1818 composition Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer) showing from the back, a man standing on a mountain peak contemplating the misty sublime landscape below, a communion of individual and the natural landscape, a theme that runs through all his paintings (Amstutz, 2020; Andrews, 1999, 143–144). Later, English landscape painters such as John Constable (1776–1837) and JMW Turner (1775–1851) redefine the English landscape painting tradition. For Constable his focus was mainly on the pastoral scenes of East Anglia rather than sublime mountains, for Turner it was capturing the abstract power of nature in all its force (Rees, 1982), but somehow capturing an indefinable element of ‘Englishness’ there in the landscape.

The Romantic ethos even influenced the design of gardens. From the mid-late nineteenth century the vogue for formalised gardens fell out of favour. The accent was now upon trying to evoke the naturalistic and informal, yet paradoxically this attempt to make gardens reflect natural spaces meant that this could only be achieved through a good deal of human intervention. The famous Victorian garden writer Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932), is best known for promoting this approach, yet as we have noted embodies a paradox:

Already in the nineteenth century, ecologically sensitive narratives clashed explicitly with anthropocentric ones, while also faced with the immense difficulty of implementing relations equally conducive to cultural and biotic health. Jekyll's conflicts, clearly, mirror those of her period. (Kehler, 2007, 619)

It is also pertinent to note that a very modernist technology, photography, also emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a means of capturing elemental landscapes (DeLuca & Demo, 2000) and cementing the idea of place and national identity, particularly in the case of the disparate German-speaking nation states (Jäger, 2021). Landscape and language were unifying factors here. The Völkisch Movement which emerged in the nineteenth century drew inspiration from the relativist Romantic perspective (Hare & Link, 2019), urging a rekindling of interest in German folklore and traditions started by the Brothers Grimm, a back-to-nature celebration of German cultures and landscapes, particularly the primal forests (Imort, 2001, 2005), but one which soon soured and provided a great deal of impetus later on to Nazi perceptions of Germanic racial superiority. Nationalism and attachment to place is very much a theme which emerges in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth-century relationship between people and places was very much contextualised within the idea of a national pastoral image.

In the United States of America, the philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) wrote an influential manifesto for the American Romantic movement. His 1836 essay Nature outlined through his philosophy of transcendentalism the importance of the beauty of the natural world as a means for understanding the human condition (Emerson, 2017). This work influenced one of the most important nature writers of the nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). In July 1845, Thoreau embarked on a two-year solitary stay at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, using his time to reflect on the natural world and its importance to humanity, publishing his experiences in the book Walden, or Life in the Woods in 1854 and provoking wider debates around conservation and environmentalism (Buell, 1995; Cafaro, 2002). Thoreau’s ideas were embraced by a young Scottish Immigrant, John Muir (1838–1914), and although the two did not meet, it is clear that Thoreau had a significant influence on Muir’s development as a nascent environmentalist (Fleck, 1985).

In the 1860s, Muir was an enthusiastic walker and found himself, after a series of adventures, in the rugged mountains of Yosemite, California, and a place that would be his spiritual and professional nirvana. Through the later part of the nineteenth-century Muir was a prime mover in environmental preservation, fighting the logging companies and seeking a means to develop legislation and management plans for Yosemite while in the true Romantic spirit emphasising the spiritual and metaphysical associations of place (Muir, 2001 ed.). This perspective put him at odds with the leading US conservationist Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946) who rather chose to emphasise long-term sustainable conservation as opposed to the unspoilt spiritual wilderness envisaged by Muir (Meyer, 1997). His legacy though can be found in the Sierra Club, an environmental social welfare organisation he founded in 1892, and the development of Federal natural heritage legislation. Although the first US National Park was designated at Yellowstone in 1872, an umbrella controlling agency, the US National Parks Service, did not come into being until the 1916 National Park Organic Act (Fox, 1985). The foregoing section has outlined some of the key elements of ‘Romantic’ thinking and writing about landscape using a broadly international perspective (see also McKusick, 2000). The focus of this chapter, however, is upon natural heritage management in the UK and how it responded to these cultural currents. In the next section, we consider in more detail how active strategies and policies for the management of natural heritage here developed.

3.3 The Cultural Context of the Management of Natural Heritage in Britain in the Late Nineteenth Century

An appreciation of the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of natural landscapes was a key leitmotif of the Romantic worldview of the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries, and it influenced a number of important cultural figures during this period. In English literature, the nature writings of Wiltshire-born Richard Jefferies (1848–1887), for example, tapped into this ethos, inspiring a generation of later nature writers and drawing attention to the threats posed to the countryside by rampant Victorian industrialisation. He articulated a vision of environmentalism that framed many of the later debates in the management of natural heritage (Morris, 2006; Welshman, 2011). He did not just deal with accounts of his walks through the countryside, but also produced post-apocalyptic fiction, such as After London, or Wild England, that dealt with the effects of societal collapse and the rewilding of the metropolis, a theme further developed, albeit within the context of a more overt radical, nostalgic and socialist setting in William Morris’s 1890 utopian novel News from Nowhere, or an Epoch of Rest (O’Sullivan, 2011). In Morris’s imagined future, responsible and sustainable stewardship of natural heritage is an important and complimentary component of his idealised socialist political society (Macdonald, 2004).

William Morris (1834–1896), poet, socialist, radical thinker, craftsman, writer and artist, was associated with one of the most significant Romantic cultural movements in Victorian Britain, the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (MacCarthy, 1994). The pre-Raphaelites are today primarily known for their vibrant naturalistic paintings which embraced medievalist and biblical themes (Hilton, 1985), but they were also poets, writers and designers. The pre-Raphaelites had in their formative stages coalesced around one of the most significant Victorian cultural figures, John Ruskin (1819–1900). Ruskin had grown up in comfortable middle class surroundings and been exposed at an early age to Alpine landscapes as well as closer to home the Lake District, landscapes he celebrated in poetry and painting. After leaving Oxford, he wrote extensively on architectural heritage and conservation and in the 1850s fell in with the pre-Raphaelite artistic movement which focused on qualities such as aesthetics, beauty and a celebration of nature (Ruskin was also an influence on the development of responsible historical architectural conservation and preservation movements in the late nineteenth century and was a catalyst for the formation of the influential Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings).

Ruskin also became a key advocate of what would now be called social justice, and to this end he established in 1871 the League of St George, a series of utopian and improving communities focused upon traditional crafts and conservation. His wider interests in preserving heritage, including open spaces, contributed greatly to the impetus behind the National Trust and influenced a wider group of ‘back to nature’ enthusiasts in the Lake District such as Susan Beever (1805–1893), Hardwicke Rawnsley (1851–1920) and William Gershom Collingwood (1854–1932) (Albritton & Jonsson, 2016). The League of St George still exists today as a charity, which continues to place an emphasis upon sustainability and self-sufficiency, but it was at the time, just one of many Victorian societies devoted to the conservation and preservation of open-air spaces for the benefit of all. Ruskin’s work certainly influenced the career of another significant Victorian environmental campaigner, Octavia Hill (1838–1912) (Hewison, 2007, 57–66).

Octavia Hill grew up in a family which had strong social convictions. Social justice was an important part of her upbringing, and in her 20s started to agitate for the improvement of slum housing in London, and at the same time developed a campaigning interest in saving London’s green spaces from development, and ensuring that access to these spaces could be guaranteed for all. Hill in fact was the first person to use the term ‘Green Belt’ as part of her (unsuccessful) struggle to ensure that the fields at Swiss Cottage remained un-developed (Kelly, 2022, 11ff; Whelan, 2009). Hill’s sister Miranda Hill (1836–1910) was also cut from a similar campaigning cloth. In 1875/1876 she established the John Kyrle Society which commemorated the philanthropic career of Ross-on-Wye’s John Kyrle (1637–1724), a man who devoted himself to providing clean water and public gardens for the inhabitants of the small Herefordshire town. The John Kyrle Society in its Victorian context placed great store upon the preservation of urban green space beyond Ross-on-Wye.

The John Kyrle Society was not the only Victorian social endeavour aimed at preserving and managing green spaces in late nineteenth-century Britain (Ranlett, 1983); the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, founded in 1882, campaigned along similar lines as the John Kyrle Society. The Lake District Defence Society, marshalled by the redoubtable Hardwicke Rawnsley, fought the expansion of railways into the area, while the Manchester Society for the Preservation of Ancient Footpaths sought to ensure the continuity of public access to landscapes. This group was founded as early as 1826 and its ethos foreshadows the famous and ground-breaking Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of April 1932. The Society for the Checking of Abuses of Public Advertising was concerned more with the aesthetics of the countryside rather than issues around access, and they campaigned against the unsightly encroachment of advertising signage along the routes of railways as they cut through the countryside (Readman, 2001).

The Commons Preservation Society was one of the largest of the environmentalist groups and was founded in 1865 with the purpose of combatting, as its name suggests, the development of the main London urban and peri-urban commons (Cowell, 2002). It survives in the twenty-first century as the Open Spaces Society. Robert (later Sir Robert) Hunter (1844–1913) acted as the main legal advisor to the Commons Preservation Society and developed strong and enduring links with Octavia Hill, as well as Hardwicke Rawnsley in the Lake District. It soon became apparent that a more coherent approach to the preservation and management of England’s natural spaces would be required, and in 1895, after a period of negotiation and planning, Hill, Hunter and Rawnsley formally established the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty.

The National Trust thus has its roots in a number of Victorian civic societies and groupings that were dedicated to the preservation of landscapes in the face of encroaching industrialisation but also placed social justice and wellbeing at the heart of their mission. In its formative years, the National Trust was very much a campaigning organisation, and over the following decades it rather lost that ethos and in the mid-twentieth century (perhaps unfairly) was regarded as being somewhat elitist and out of touch (Chapter 4 this volume). The National Trust was very much of its time as well, and must be viewed within the wider Victorian socio-cultural context too. The debt to the work of Ruskin is clear, and its mission statement and ethos mirrors other legislative and societal developments in the period which focused on the protection of natural and cultural heritage assets more widely (we have noted the establishment of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings above, but this was also the period when the first meaningful legislative protection of archaeological sites, the Ancient Monuments Act of 1882 was enacted).

The first gift to the National Trust in 1895 was a parcel of landscape, five acres of clifftop at Dinas Oleu, Barmouth. In 1899 the Trust then purchased two acres of land at Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire establishing for the first time under their aegis a nature reserve. The significance of Wicken Fen related not just to its biodiversity, but as a representative landscape of one of the last pieces of undrained fenland. Surrounded on all sides by shrunken, drained fenlands, shaped into vast agricultural fields, this small oasis of relic swampland had long attracted botanists and scientists from the University of Cambridge. Now there are approximately 629 acres under management, and the site is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, a National Nature Reserve, and internationally recognised as a Ramsar Wetland Site of international importance (National Trust, 2023).

Today, the National Trust is the premier guardian of natural and cultural heritage in England and Wales. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its finances in the face of falling footfall and visits by foreign tourists demonstrated what an important part of the leisure tourism landscape in the UK it is. And, as is noted in another Chapter 4 its attempts to be more socially inclusive have recently aroused the ire of a certain segment of the media and political class in the UK. Yet this is precisely what its Victorian creators envisaged: an organisation that placed social justice and access to the countryside for all at the heart of what it did. This is the theme that runs through the Victorian approaches to people and places, and as we shall see in the next section, this is not an idea that has run out of time. The Romantic spirit is still with us.

3.4 Natural Heritage and the Legacy of the Romantic Movement

Landscape has been, and is, endlessly and thoughtfully trivialised by people who suppose it is enough to paint views….the land is the foundation on which everything stands; the ground of all action and feeling. (Neve, 2020, 12)

The landscape commits suicide every day. (Neve, 2020, 13)

The Romantic movement of the late nineteenth–nineteenth centuries was an important artistic, cultural and social phenomenon, one which made us reassess our relationship with the natural world and how we managed it. This is not a phenomenon associated solely with Britain, but as we have seen impacted upon European and North American ways of thinking about green and blue spaces. As we have seen, this ‘view from above’ in the words of Mathew Johnson (2007, 22) and associated very much with Wordsworth’s relationship with the landscapes of the Lake District in northern England had a profound effect on our organisation of space: ‘one of the greatest achievements of the Romantics…was the development of an environmental sensibility’ (Johnson, 2007, 23). We have considered here the role of the Romantic movement in influencing the management of natural (and indeed cultural) heritage from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century against a backdrop of radical, socialist thinking, nationalism, a desire for equality of access, an accent upon the aesthetic and some degree of nostalgia (Hill, 2021, 3). But the legacy can still be felt into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In terms of environmental policy development, the influence of nineteenth-century thinking about our relationship with place has survived. More protected areas were defined under a range of different levels of legislation. The Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) was established in 1926 under the presidentship of Sir Patrick Abercrombie (1879–1957), a town planner who ironically forged a reputation in his post-World War 2 British urban replanning for unsympathetic redevelopment of historical townscapes and the development of the concept of ‘new towns’. The CPRE emerged with the support of among others the National Trust and Commons Preservation Society. It led the way in supporting the establishment of Green Belts and National Parks, culminating in the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act which ultimately led to the establishment of National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and National Nature Reserves. Human relations to place remained central to artistic expression.

In the twentieth century, painters still sought to capture the essence of the English landscape (Neve, 2020). Writing about place and identity became popular through the twentieth century, and not just from the perspective of historical-geographical studies like the work of W. G. Hoskins, a historian who as Johnson has demonstrated (2007) provides the foundation for historical archaeological studies of the evolution of the British landscape, but who is also in a sense carrying the romantic attachment to a sense of place and quintessential Englishness. Through the late 1950s, publishing houses such as Batsford and Robert Hale and motoring companies such as Shell and the Automobile Association produced regional touring guides capturing the essence or sense of place of discrete parcels of British landscape. Into the 1960s the outer esoteric fringes of the place writing genre (such as John Michell) sought to tap into the ‘earth mysteries’ and the mystical elements of the British landscape, recalling the visions of William Blake in the early nineteenth century. In the twenty-first century, writers like Robert Macfarlane, Phillip Marsden and (in a more urban environment) Iain Sinclair challenge our notions about place and placehood. We seem, thanks to the romantic perspective, to have reclaimed the sense of the genius loci, or spirit of place, in our landscape.

Writing in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear to this author (who essentially comes from a landscape-archaeology intellectual background) that we have reclaimed a deep relationship to our familiar places. The lockdown forced us to investigate afresh our very local environs, through the medium mainly of walking. The end of lockdown saw a huge influx of visitors into the countryside (Chapter 14). We started to reconnect with our sense of place again and perhaps started to sense the more esoteric and numinous elements of our environments, which have been there all along, but perhaps something which is forgotten in capitalist Western societies (Abram, 1996). In this connection perhaps we could finish with reference to a much abused term in modern cultural and literary circles, and one which informs a great deal of contemporary place writing but which has impacted hugely on the way we react to space and place around us: psychogeography.

Psychogeography began life as a 1950s French outgrowth of the surrealist and anarchic Situationist movement. Under its ‘founder’ Guy Debord, it set out with a manifesto to reclaim space, in this case urban space, through the act of guerrilla walking, but as Merlin Coverley has demonstrated, the currents of psychogeography can be traced back in the Anglophone tradition as far as Daniel Defoe, arriving at Iain Sinclair via William Blake, Thomas de Quincey and Arthur Machen inter alia. We can also see reference points in the concept of the flâneur (urban wandered) of nineteenth-century Paris, immortalised by Charles Baudelaire and celebrated in Walther Benjamin’s monumental Arcades project in the 1940s (see Coverley, 2010 for a comprehensive overview). It may now be a well-worn trope, but essentially psychogeography is all about the way we react emotionally to place, and place reacts emotionally to us, and it is this intangible value which ought to be at the heart of any policy development relating to the relationship between people and place. This was understood by the Romantic writers over two hundred years ago and needs to be remembered today.