One of the great joys in life is walking in the countryside. While most of my life has been spent living in cities or large towns, I have felt a peculiar connection to the British countryside that I can’t ever quite put my finger on the source of. Perhaps it’s the quiet, merely the briefest respite from the turmoil of city-life. It could also be something more personal, a familial connection running through the centuries, sparks of memory from childhood and the stories past along through the generations.
Britain’s agricultural areas have always been working landscapes, so any paean to the virgin soil, the great unspoilt landscape strikes a odd note. I was reminded of quite how much a working landscape it was earlier this week. Over the past few months I’ve been plotting my family history, making huge spidery diagrams of uncles and aunts, great-grandparents and long forgotten cousins. While my father’s side have for the most part been members of the urban working class for most of the past 6 generations, such in that other great cauldron of industrialism in the West Midlands, occasionally branching out as far as Rochdale; my mother’s family have been, and often still are, country people.
My great-great-grandfather Samuel Jones was born in the 1840s in Market Drayton near the Shropshire-Cheshire border – and less than 20 miles from where my parents now live. Following the census records, he was by turns an agricultural labourer, a “canalside labourer” and a groom (presumably with horses), and then, by his late 40s, he was back working on a farm. Of his 13 children, most of them too went to work on various farms, some in Wales, most in Cheshire or Shropshire. My mother’s grandfather, Walter, managed a few farms but mostly laboured for others, as did in turn my own grandfather Jim.
Around the time that both Samuel and Walter would have been putting spade to earth, John Ruskin was writing his series of letters to the workmen of England, Fors Clavigera. These were initially published as a series of pamphlets before being collected into several bound volumes, and with them, Ruskin intended to educate the common man with him anti-mechanical, romantic vision. As we all know there’s a kind of Tory radicalism in Ruskin, and one that was to have both left and right tributaries over the decades.
By his fifth letter, it’s obvious that Ruskin realises that the common man is perhaps not cut out to hear his lectures delivered from on high. He stretches and twists trying to free himself of the binds of his own pessimistic creation. He hopes for change but lacks the means for which to achieve it. “For me”, he says: “the birds do not sing, nor ever will. But they would, for you, if you cared to have it so.” Economics and science have so debased man of the nineteenth century, the time’s follies brandished so cheerfully, as if “for a warning to the farthest future.”
Such follies of humanity’s creation, the machines and technology that so enthralled Victorian-man, rebound back on themselves. And for this, it is the viaduct that stands for the whole:
“if you feel yourself to be only a machine, constructed to be a Regulator of minor machinery, you will put your statue of such science on your Holborn Viaduct, and necessarily recognize only major machinery as regulating you.”
Once more just a stone’s throw from where Samuel and Walter were toiling was the now closed train line that connected Buxton and Matlock in the Peak District with Manchester in the industrial North-West. This line was, as with so many of Britain’s small branch lines, closed in the 1960s – although this time by Labour’s Barbara Castle and not as part of the Beeching reforms. But, the track stretches through some of the most beautiful scenery in England, cutting through the lime- and gritstone of the High Peaks and, just outside Buxton, stretching across the River Wye on another viaduct, the Headstone.
The viaduct now seems, dotted as it is with patches of slow-growing lichen, it’s crags and gaps home to birds and insects, as much a part of nature as the limestone peaks that surround it. But, in the 1860s, Ruskin thought that such structures were a blight on the natural beauty of the land.
“You think it a great triumph to make the sun draw brown landscapes for you. That was also a discovery, and some day may be useful. But the sun had drawn landscapes before for you, not in brown, but in green, and blue, and all imaginable colours, here in England. Not one of you ever looked at them then; not one of you cares for the loss of them now, when you have shut the sun out with smoke, so that he can draw nothing more, except brown blots through a hole in a box. There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening—Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the light—walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the Times calls “Railroad Enterprise.” You Enterprised a Railroad through the valley—you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the Gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you Fools Everywhere.”
Nature, Ruskin seems to be saying to us, through the centuries and against his wishes, changes. There is nothing static in the countryside, nature is not natural but a humming thrumming working landscape even still. And when we ourselves are gone, the natural world will, as with the lichen on the stones of the viaduct, take us with it.