Both history and travel book, Landskipping is a meditation on the nature of the British landscape of matchless brilliance and iridescent beauty that will reshape the way we think about our country.
A remarkable study of how we experience and think about the British landscape, opening in the eighteenth century with the birth of the countryside as a cultural phenomenon in Britain. The early travel guides, the paintings of Constable and Turner, the poetry and prose of Coleridge and Hardy, all sought to capture the beauty and inspiration of waterfall, lake or fell.
Anna Pavord now joins their numbers, evoking in ravishing detail her own journeys across the landscape, from the rolling hills of Dorset to the sublime peaks of the Scottish Highlands. In spirit as Romantic as rational, she explores the tension between the emotional and artistic resonances of pure nature and the sculpting of its lines by man and economic endeavours, leading to an underpinning concept that it is the intense relationship between man and earth that has made the landskip what it is today, while it in turn has the capacity to frame and define our own experiences.
Landskipping is nature writing at its most expansive, encompassing with elegant ease the historical and the beautiful, the abstract and the personal. It is a paean to our landscape: its sheer stunning diversity of scenery, its potential to comfort, awe and mesmerise. It both establishes a new genre and masters it; it is a literary event and a classic.
