Editorial

Landscapes and people’s identities seem strongly interconnected, so it is no wonder that landscapes in Britain and around the world have been used for many centuries as calls to action through a whole range of different media. In the Great War of 1914–18 British recruiting posters like Your Country’s Call (1915) used the landscape imagery of thatched English cottages and rolling green hills to prompt the question ‘Isn’t this worth fighting for?’ But the young soldier in the poster urging the viewer to ‘ENLIST NOW’ is a Scottish infantryman in a kilt: like many who signed up he would surely have been unlikely to have ever seen such a place. From ‘Neo-Romantic’ painters of the 1940s to contemporary nature writers, poets and environmentalists, landscapes have been taken as a starting point for many momentous arguments. The causes that are espoused may vary, but the images of landscapes which are conjured up in rhetoric or iconography often have much in common.

The many interwoven political, social, economic and historical factors which contribute to shaping both landscape and identity are difficult to define and unpick, and vary for each individual, society and place. The awkward juxtaposition of the Scottish infantryman and the southern English landscape in Your Country’s Call serves to underline the point that there is no single ‘British’ landscape, an idea that was well-understood by the agricultural writers who 500 years ago contrasted the ‘champion’ and the ‘woodland’ regions of England. The same variability is equally characteristic of landscapes elsewhere in Europe and across the world, and various techniques have been developed to help understand this diversity. One of Europe’s leading landscape bodies, the Catalan Landscape Observatory, has recently contributed a significant advance in the field by publishing the method it developed for its qualitative landscape assessment covering the whole territory and published as series of Catàlegs de paisatge (Landscape Catalogues, available digitally online¹) (Nogué et al. 2016). By integrating public participation in the preparation of the Catalogues, the Observatory has pioneered collaborative ways to involve people of all sorts in landscape management and planning. Their methodology recognises not only that the character of the Catalan landscape varies significantly from place to place, but also that different people – who all have a stake in landscapes – see the same places in different ways.

In all these respects the Catalan Landscape Catalogues reflect the ambitions of the European Landscape Convention (ELC). Understanding the character of landscapes today, how they came to be shaped, and how they are likely to change in the future has therefore become a fundamental part of landscape researchers’ work. In its Guidelines for Implementation of the ELC, the Council of Europe notes the potential role of landscape observatories and similar bodies, and the Catalan Landscape Observatory provides an inspiring example of how much a relatively small organisation can achieve. In February this year, one of the editors (ST) attended the International Conference on Landscape Observatories hosted at the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency in Amersfoort. The conference heard from Berno Strootman, National Advisor on the Physical Environment to the Netherlands Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, who commented that ‘landscape is the battleground for the big transitions that are coming’. The truth of this statement is perhaps most immediately striking in a country like the Netherlands, where no corner of the land is untouched by people and yet the whole stands to be affected very tangibly by environmental change. But presentations from across Europe reflected on similar themes: to address the impacts of climate change, economic transformation, agricultural intensification, migration and many of the other major challenges which face society we need to monitor not only the natural and cultural elements of landscapes, but also the interactions between them; and we need to plan how we want landscapes to change in the future. The Landscape Observatories of different sorts that are being established across Europe, from Spain, France and Italy to the Netherlands and Scandinavia are designed to help address these problems.

In March, both your Editors attended a workshop in London sponsored by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council on the theme of ‘Brexit and Heritage’. There were important warnings about unintended consequences, especially pertinent in the field of landscape where the potential weakening of environmental protection could have major repercussions. A good example is provided by the 2014 revisions to the European Environmental Impact Assessment Directive, which effectively puts a landscape approach into law. The specialists assembled at the Brexit and Heritage meeting seemed uncertain how long such policy advances might survive in a post-Brexit world focused on sustaining economic growth. It would be deeply ironic if an attempt to ‘take control’ by leaving the European Union were to lead to weaker environmental controls and increasingly degraded landscapes. Pretty scenes of English country cottages might survive, but the everyday landscapes where most people live and work would be most likely to suffer: the negative consequences of impoverished landscapes would inevitably fall on the many, not the few. Anyone with an interest in landscapes, whichever way they voted in the UK’s Brexit referendum, surely has a responsibility to separate the romantic rhetoric from the day-to-day reality. We need to work hard together to make sure that we understand landscapes of all kinds and the ways they are changing – only then will we be able to shape better places for the generations of the future.

Such themes have always been a feature of Landscapes, and a glance back through our eighteen volumes will show many examples. There are plenty of reminders in this issue of Landscapes of how political change has shaped landscape and its social meaning, predominantly in Eve Campbell’s discussion of the O’Callaghan lordships in Co. Cork, Ireland, and there is also an account by Kirsty Millican and her co-workers of the Scotland’s Historic Land-use Assessment project to match the Catalan catalogues in terms of helping to define identity at every scale. Tim Breen reminds us, by looking at the survival or otherwise of public roads in early modern England, that law remains an important factor in the shaping and experiencing of landscapes; his focus on movement in the landscape mirrors this issue’s review article on movement in landscape by Oscar Aldred, and Owen Davies’ review of an important new book on medieval roads in the landscape. Finally, two papers remind us of the harsh environments, physical, political or social, within which people make their landscapes: Beatrice Widell’s paper, linked to spirituality and perception, about the sea-bound landscapes of early monasticism in Argyll (which mirrors Paddy Gleeson’s review of two books on early Christianity and sacred sites); and a paper by Ian Simmons (an early supporter and contributor from this journal’s earliest days), now writing in his retirement on the never-ending relationship between the sea and the land in the Lincolnshire Fens.

Notes

1. http://www.catpaisatge.net/eng/publicacions_coedicions.php