Time and Tide: The Long, Long History of Landscape
Fiona Stafford (John Murray, £20)
IN our arrogance we consider alterations we make to the face of the earth superior, more permanent, than any effected before. The British variant of the teleology is caught in the title of W. G. Hoskins’s famous 1954 book The Making of the English Landscape, with its hint of end goal achieved, job done. Fiona Stafford’s landscape history of these isles is rather more ‘The making and making again of the countryside’. She is correct. To use a pompous word, landscape is palimpsest, a surface constantly reworked.
‘The only certain tide in the affairs of men is that everything ends in drowning or dust’
Hers is not an exhaustive, academic study, more a personal picaresque one (and the better for it, save for the convoluted, throat-clearing introduction and a self-indulgent finale). Oddly for a book on Britain’s changing landscape, she
