Distant Green Pastures

Tastes are subjective. What pleases one may not please another. So it is in landscape. But it's not such a wide divergence as you might think. In general most people respond in a similar way. The convergence can be seen when you look at popular subjects for landscape painting and photography. And when an advertiser or magazine editor wishes to choose a picture that exemplifies some sort of countryside idyll it's not hard to predict what the ingredients will be. We like high mountains with dramatic rocky summits, but we also like green pastures bounded by hedges and mature trees.

The case in point here is the views from on high of distant panoramas of traditional farmland. The close-up perspective is another thing. But many get great comfort from looking down on the spread of green fields each with its own differently angled boundary and the occasional farmstead with groups of trees all seeming on a modest and human scale and reminiscent of an age when land was managed in a manner characterised by a balance between nature and man. That has now been swept aside by industrialised farming with just a few pockets left to please the eye. One of these lies to the east of Blacka and each May I fear that it could have succumbed to the trend for growing oil seed rape. The rape flowers only for a few weeks but it is just that time in spring when the distant green pastures should be at their most beguiling.

It's a reminder of just how vulnerable our countryside is and how unrelenting is the march of the economic drive for industrialising of the land. Many of the most picturesque and valued parts of our countryside are now degraded leaving less and less for us just to stare at. Mega-sized fields stripped of their hedges are now the norm in some areas that were once noted for landscape beauty. It leaves us wondering about the treeless moors up here, kept as they are by remotely controlled industrial management. Advocates for keeping them treeless cite the openness and the ease with which distant views can be seen. If much of the previous appeal in those views vanishes, what then? Will we be left with views of quarries and cement works, plastic covered bales, wind turbines, farmyards full of decaying machinery and huge fields given over to a monoculture? All the more reason to de-industrialise and set free the uplands.