… my mother to the birdsA memory of her mother Concita who, while hanging washingon the line, would stand on one leg and whistle to the birds.It may be that she stood on one leg simply to rest her other leg,she was such a busy woman.36
Becoming stoneWhen I was about ten, the elm trees began to die. Warwickshire is undramaticcountry, once known for its lovely Dutch elms. Within a few years, they hadall been felled. Half a century later I still see their ghosts when I find myself inthe landscape of my childhood. By that crossroads, at the cattle grid, behindthe farm: their rangy, open silhouettes stand in my mind’s eye. Those bornafter 1970, those who have moved to this small village later in life, see nothingamiss. For me, the land will always carry the scars of its lost beauty.That’s the essence of landscape. It’s a human creation, meaning madefrom feeling, knowledge and memory. Land is a scientific concept. A greataunt spent 20 years mapping the geology of her Northamptonshire home,producing a scholarly treatise that, apart from its colourful soil maps, wasincomprehensible to me. Land changes slowly and in understandable ways.We know how ancient forests become coal, or animal bones limestone.Knowing such things, we use or exploit land, applying our science to extractvalue from its soil and rocks.But landscape is not so easily capitalised. Landscape is a story, a telling ofwhat we see—or once saw—and what it means to us. Where land is fixed andknowable, tradable even, landscape is fluid. We each have our own point ofview, our private maps of the places we live. This is where we used to playhide and seek. That’s the tree my brother fell from. The woman who livesthere never speaks to anyone.The archaeologist, Matthew Johnson, writes that‘the governing metaphor for this movement from the observation of thelandscape to the printed page is one of reading. The Ordnance Surveymap is a document in a foreign language, which at least in the early stagesof his life Hoskins did not feel he knew how to translate; the landscapeneeds to be “read” or decoded.’ 137But before landscape can be read, it must be written. And it is written bypeople, not nature. It is people who named this river ‘Severn’ and wholaunched a flotilla of myths about its character and history to drift out tosea. It is people who marked its surface with paths and bridges, shelters,tombs and temples, boundaries, hedges, halls and homes. The reason for the
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