Low Light

Blipper Mima has encouraged me to read the book that was set for me 50 years ago, but I was too busy idle to read: The Making of the English Landscape (Hoskins). I'm less than a quarter of the way through it but she, and my long-dead tutor, are right: it adds beauty to any view, because it explains why things might look the way they do. The forward says it was admired by W H Auden, so you can guess it's rewarding prose

He discusses the ridge-and-furrow fields of the south Midlands. In school history lessons we were taught that these are a relic of the communal open-fields of the pre-enclosures period, when every tenant ploughed the strip of land from the edge to the centre, year upon year, turning it into a ridged profile, with a ditch or furrow dividing it from the neighboiring strip

Hoskins asserts that many ridge-and-furrow fields are no such thing, and were actually created in the 19th century as a primitive form of drainage. I've always known that, but have always felt dissatisfied that I couldn't be sure what I'm looking at in any particular field. Reassuringly (to me) he says that it is very difficult to determine the origin without detailed investigation

The low sun, that arrives in mid-afternoon now we have reverted to astronomical time, shows them up clearly. These ones are actually quite shallow and not the most striking example - but they do have a burning bush in front of them