The Making of the British Landscape by Nicholas Crane
Laura Beatty
LAURA BEATTY The Making of the British Landscape: From the Ice Age to the Present
It is time, possibly, for a book on the making of books on the making of the landscape. We do it so often and we have been doing it for so long: Hoskins’s The Making of the English Landscape (1955); Rackham’s The History of the Countryside (1986); Pryor’s The Making of the British Landscape (2010); and now Crane; and in between, an avalanche of personal wanderings, exhuming, enumerating, exploring, regretting and recording.
These are serious accounts and this is by no means the least of them, so there must be some reason why we keep on writing this book. Crane’s approach, sensibly for a culture sunk in second childhood, is to engage – to tell a ‘clean story’. Starting when the island was still connected to the continental mainland and not stopping until the Shard sticks itself like a thorn into the English sky, he describes both the land itself and the waves of its various inhabitants; the people who foraged, who worked in wood, in stone, in bronze. He describes the armies of outsiders who invaded and he describes the armies of insiders who modified, drained, enclosed, managed and exploited.
For the sake of immediacy and narrative continuity and, despite obvious and exhaustive research, Crane makes a stated decision against footnotes. This is to be something else, a kind of word cinema; the most visually and emotionally vivid account possible, as if willing us to care. And we do. It is an astonishing imaginative effort and, if sometimes high-flown, it is full of unforgettable things. The knappers knocking at their tinkling flints by day and night, and the underground labyrinths of their mines, ‘like inverted trees’; the Roman invasion, which is better told than I have ever read, with its almost pre-fab camps and forts ‘thudding into Britain’. The big set pieces involving climate change, Doggerland’s submersion under a giant tidal wave, the relentless ice ages, the volcanic dust clouds, the plagues, are all horrifyingly dramatic. But behind the drama, as a settled people emerge, is the shadow of a subtler and more original story.
Crane is a geographer by training. About halfway through the book detailing the disappearance of villages in the 15th century, he stops. ‘Let’s start with climate … it’s always the cloud beyond the horizon; the earth system that governs all.’ These things, weather systems, tectonic shifts, are what really trigger change in our world. All of human history is just aftershock. What makes his book compelling is its wholeness. It is the account of something as knitted as a marriage. England’s surface is the record, if you know how to read it, of a long and often brutal dialogue between the cosmos, with its extreme and unpredictable violence, and man doggedly adapting and surviving. Our national obsession with the weather has very deep roots.
Once we became an island, flight became more difficult. We had to sit it out. Dazed with natural disaster, the British, who have spent centuries fighting flood, sit down by a river and wait for the Romans the other side of it to go away. In full armour and as a matter of course, the Batavi, brought up in softer climes, simply fling themselves in and swim across. This is Crane’s narrative turningpoint. After this, we learn slowly to urbanise. And once we’ve got going we are better at this than most. We have only a small patch of land but we use every inch of it. We control and organise and enhance until the whole environment is man-made. ‘We remove mountains,’ as Carlyle says. ‘Nothing can resist us. We
war with rude Nature; and by our resistless engines, come off always victorious.’
In the 1920s H V Morton gets into his car and goes In Search of England. And so the tradition begins. We have somehow lost England, in our minds. The long dialogue has got unbalanced, or England, like some ancient mother, has lost influence, mumbling to herself in some abandoned corner. And so we visit, on bicycles, in macs. And we remember how it used to be. And we write letters, like this one, over and over again. What is it we are saying? ‘Goodbye’? ‘Sorry’? Hatchards price: £18