̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - landscape

Study uncovers earliest evidence of humans using fire to shape the landscape of Tasmania

sc604 — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 19:00:00 +0000

A team of researchers from the UK and Australia analysed charcoal and pollen contained in ancient mud to determine how Aboriginal Tasmanians shaped their surroundings. This is the earliest record of humans using fire to shape the Tasmanian environment.

Early human migrations from Africa to the southern part of the globe were well underway during the early part of the last ice age – humans reached northern Australia by around 65,000 years ago. When the first Palawa/Pakana (Tasmanian Indigenous) communities eventually reached Tasmania (known to the Palawa people as Lutruwita), it was the furthest south humans had ever settled.

These early Aboriginal communities used fire to penetrate and modify dense, wet forest for their own use – as indicated by a sudden increase in charcoal accumulated in ancient mud 41,600 years ago.

̽��ֱ��researchers say their results, reported in the journal Science Advances, could not only help us understand how humans have been shaping the Earth’s environment for tens of thousands of years, but also help understand the long-term Aboriginal-landscape connection, which is vital for landscape management in Australia today.

Tasmania currently lies about 240 kilometres off the southeast Australian coast, separated from the Australian mainland by the Bass Strait. However, during the last ice age, Australia and Tasmania were connected by a huge land bridge, allowing people to reach Tasmania on foot. ̽��ֱ��land bridge remained until about 8,000 years ago, after the end of the last ice age, when rising sea levels eventually cut Tasmania off from the Australian mainland.

“Australia is home to the world’s oldest Indigenous culture, which has endured for over 50,000 years,” said Dr Matthew Adeleye from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, the study’s lead author. “Earlier studies have shown that Aboriginal communities on the Australian mainland used fire to shape their habitats, but we haven’t had similarly detailed environmental records for Tasmania.”

̽��ֱ��researchers studied ancient mud taken from islands in the Bass Strait, which is part of Tasmania today, but would have been part of the land bridge connecting Australia and Tasmania during the last ice age. Due to low sea levels at the time, Palawa/Pakana communities were able to migrate from the Australian mainland.

Analysis of the ancient mud showed a sudden increase in charcoal around 41,600 years ago, followed by a major change in vegetation about 40,000 years ago, as indicated by different types of pollen in the mud.

“This suggests these early inhabitants were clearing forests by burning them, in order to create open spaces for subsistence and perhaps cultural activities,” said Adeleye. “Fire is an important tool, and it would have been used to promote the type of vegetation or landscape that was important to them.”

̽��ֱ��researchers say that humans likely learned to use fire to clear and manage forests during their migration across the glacial landscape of Sahul – a palaeocontinent that encompassed modern-day Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and eastern Indonesia – as part of the extensive migration out of Africa.

“As natural habitats adapted to these controlled burnings, we see the expansion of fire-adapted species such as Eucalyptus, primarily on the wetter, eastern side of the Bass Strait islands,” said Adeleye.

Burning practices are still practiced today by Aboriginal communities in Australia, including for landscape management and cultural activities. However, using this type of burning, known as cultural burning, for managing severe wildfires in Australia remains contentious. ̽��ֱ��researchers say understanding this ancient land management practice could help define and restore pre-colonial landscapes.

“These early Tasmanian communities were the island’s first land managers,” said Adeleye. “If we’re going to protect Tasmanian and Australian landscapes for future generations, it’s important that we listen to and learn from Indigenous communities who are calling for a greater role in helping to manage Australian landscapes into the future.”

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by the Australian Research Council.

Reference:
Matthew A Adeleye et al. ‘Landscape burning facilitated Aboriginal migration into Lutruwita/Tasmania 41,600 years ago.’ Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adp6579

Some of the first human beings to arrive in Tasmania, over 41,000 years ago, used fire to shape and manage the landscape, about 2,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Simon Haberle

Emerald Swamp, Tasmania

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Cambridge researchers to tackle major threats to 'UK’s vegetable garden'

plc32 — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Although covering less than 4% of England’s farmed area, the Fens produce more than 7% of England’s total agricultural production, worth £1.23 billion. But they are threatened by climate change and their ancient peat soils are drying out, releasing millions of tonnes of CO₂.
̽��ֱ��Cairngorms are home to over a quarter of the UK’s endangered species, from capercaillies to ospreys.
̽��ֱ��Lake District is a national treasure and a UNESCO World Heritage Site but future changes in agricultural subsidies present both challenges and opportunities for the landscape

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Centre for Landscape Regeneration project will work with farmers, local communities and conservation groups to tackle environmental threats in these areas. This major countryside regeneration project will be led by Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI), Cambridge Zero and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), in partnership with the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and the Endangered Landscape Programme.

Professor Emily Shuckburgh OBE, Director of Cambridge Zero said: "We aim to make a demonstrable difference to the way landscape restoration is designed, implemented, scaled up and supported by policy, ensuring solutions are resilient, inclusive and sustainable."

Funding for the work with farmers, landowners, conservation groups and local communities to address ecological threats such as extinction, flooding, drought and pollution comes from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) as part of its £40 million 'Changing the Environment' programme.

̽��ֱ��UK’s vegetable garden

̽��ֱ��Fens contain almost half of the UK’s grade-1 agricultural land and support a farming industry worth around £3 billion across the food chain. Farming there directly employs over 10,000 people and supports around 80,000 jobs more widely.

̽��ֱ��area is the vegetable garden of UK horticulture with 33% of England's fresh vegetables grown here. More than a half of UK-grown lettuce and over 75% of UK-grown celery are produced in the Fens. Alongside salads, key vegetable crops such as carrots, leeks, potatoes, onions and beetroot are also extensively grown on the Fens.

Yet this fertile landscape faces a host of existential environmental challenges. It is estimated that only 1% of the original wetlands in the Fens remain intact and 30% of the peatlands have been lost – emitting millions of tonnes of carbon in the process.

Just as alarmingly, the region is projected to run out of water in five to 10 years, while simultaneously being threatened by rising sea levels.

Project researchers have been working closely with farmers in the region to find environmental solutions that work for them and their communities. Fourth-generation Fens farmer and Fenland SOIL steering committee member Tom Clarke said: "Farming in the Fens faces a triple threat – a climate challenge, a nature challenge, and a food security challenge. ̽��ֱ��best defence is for farming is to be less defensive about some of the problems it has contributed to. We farmers instead need to work in a positive and pragmatic way to find opportunities and solutions for the farmers of the future."

Agriculture in this eastern region of England is of vital importance not just to the whole UK, but also to local people who rely on it for a living. That is why simply rewilding the Fens to preserve and restore its ecosystem is not an option. ̽��ֱ��funding from NERC will support this work and will enable researchers to find the best ways of protecting the ecosystem and its farmers.

National treasures endangered

̽��ֱ��Cairngorms and the Lake District are both national treasures, but their ecology is severely imperiled. ̽��ֱ��beauty of these popular tourist destinations obscures significant degradation and wildlife loss.

̽��ֱ��Cairngorms are under particular threat from climate change, as well as deforestation, erosion and the loss of iconic species which cannot be found anywhere else in the UK.

Teams there are working to expand and restore ancient Caledonian pinewoods. These spectacular forests have suffered from a significant loss of biodiversity and the encroachment of non-native tree species.

Professor Stephen J Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: " ̽��ֱ��interlinked extinction and climate crises pose a major threat to our future. Harnessing the full-breadth of expertise across Cambridge, this project will develop evidence-informed solutions and provide tools for government and stakeholders to regenerate landscapes for the benefit of climate, nature, the economy and society."

Whole-systems solutions

Professor David Coomes, Director of the Conservation Research Institute within CCI, said: " ̽��ֱ��emphasis of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Centre for Landscape Regeneration project will be on whole-systems approaches, as these are critical to addressing the root challenges of landscape regeneration”. This means taking a holistic, long-term view that encompasses the whole ecology of a region.

One example is the work done by Cairngorms Connect – the UK’s biggest habitat restoration project, and a partnership of a private landowner, two government agencies and an NGO (the RSPB). Their focus is 130km² of biodiverse native pinewood habitats in the Cairngorms, Scotland. ̽��ֱ��partners’ 200-year vision will expand the forest to its natural limit, thereby doubling its area. Within the existing forest they are creating more natural character by pulling down trees to simulate naturally occurring deadwood – a vital feature of a healthy forest. This deadwood benefits a wide range of animals, from invertebrates, fungi and lichens, to bird species – many of which are rare elsewhere in the UK.

Professor Jeremy Wilson, RSPB Director of Science said: "As a partner in the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, we are excited by this opportunity to tackle the problem of restoring some of our most precious but fragile landscapes for the benefit of nature, people and the climate. As one of the largest nature conservation land managers in the UK, our nature reserves are at the heart of these landscapes and the insights from this cutting-edge research will underpin our restoration work for decades to come."

In the Fens, a group of farmers is experimenting with raising the water table to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This offers a natural experiment to find out not only how such measures affect crop yields, but also its impact on the communities of insects and spiders on which bird populations and crop pollination depend.

In another example, farmers in the Fens are relaxing the usually drastic clearance of fen ditches and providing more farm reservoirs. This enables the storage of winter water for summer irrigation and also provides ideal habitats for fish and wetland birds such as herons and the Marsh Harrier – a species reduced almost to extinction in Britain in the 20th century.

Cambridge researchers will tackle environmental threats that could affect a third of England’s home-grown vegetables and more than a quarter of the UK's rare and endangered wild animals. Eco-friendly farming in the Fens, pine martens in the Cairngorms, and disappearing woodlands in the Lake District will all benefit from a £10 million countryside regeneration programme to safeguard the country’s most important agricultural land and beloved rural idylls.

̽��ֱ��emphasis of the Cambridge Centre for Landscape Regeneration project will be on whole-systems approaches, as these are critical to addressing the root challenges of landscape regeneration.

Professor David Coomes, Director of the Conservation Research Institute

J Garget via Pixabay

Wild horse on Wicken Fen

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Casting light on the dark ages: Anglo-Saxon fenland is re-imagined

amb206 — Fri, 21 Jul 2017 08:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��East Anglian fens with their flat expanses and wide skies, a tract of some of the UK’s richest farmland, are invariably described as bleak – or worse. Turn the clock back 1,000 years to a time when the silt and peat wetlands were largely undrained, and it’s easy to imagine a place that defied rather than welcomed human occupation.

Historians have long argued that during the ‘dark’ ages (the period between the withdrawal of Roman administration in around 400 AD and the Norman Conquest in 1066) most settlements in the region were deserted, and the fens became an anarchic, sparsely inhabited, watery wilderness.

A new interdisciplinary study of the region by a leading landscape archaeologist not only rewrites its early history across those six centuries but also, for the first time anywhere in Europe, offers a detailed view of the settlement and agricultural management of early medieval wetland landscapes.

Susan Oosthuizen’s ̽��ֱ��Anglo-Saxon Fenland (published last month by Windgather Press) is a prequel to the geographer Clifford Darby’s definitive study of the medieval fen, published in 1940. She draws on her interest in the relationship between early communities and their landscapes – in particular their management of herds of cattle across extensive areas of shared grazing.

Oosthuizen suggests that, rather than undergoing dramatic change after 400 AD, communities continued to live around the fen edge and on ‘islands’ of higher ground rising above the peat wetlands just as their ancestors had. Her evidence lies in the recent boost in archaeological discovery.

A five-fold increase in excavations since new planning guidance was issued in 1990, and the introduction of the Portable Antiquities Scheme in 1997 for recording finds by the public, have transformed the volume of archaeological material across Britain – including the windswept fens.

As a result the ‘dark ages’, as the period was often described, with its connotations of backwardness, is now more commonly called ‘early medieval’ which suggests less of a disjuncture between eras that appear instead to have unfolded seamlessly.

In ̽��ֱ��Anglo-Saxon Fenland, Oosthuizen argues that this new evidence shows there is little to support the idea that the fenland was anything but continuously occupied by settled, stable communities during the period 400 to 900 AD.

Who were ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ and what do we know about the fens between 400 and 900? In her prologue Oosthuizen addresses these key questions with admirable clarity. Her answers set the stage for an exploration of a fertile wetland exploited for millennia by local communities and threaded through by a network of rivers that allowed incomers from across the North Sea to penetrate as far as the English midlands.

Since the early 19th century, it has been assumed that during the 5th and 6th centuries indigenous British communities were removed altogether or reduced to servitude by incomers arriving from north-west Europe – the Anglo-Saxons – who lived in separate settlements.

There is now, however, a growing realisation among archaeologists that it is impossible to identify ‘Romano-British’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ communities on the basis of material culture, the things that people used every day. “Settlements, fields and artifacts can be distinguished by status,” argues Oosthuizen, “but not by the cultural background of the people to whom they belonged.”

She writes: “ ̽��ֱ��evidence from fenland shows that newcomers were assimilated into late British communities; there was no displacement of populations nor establishment of separate communities.” ̽��ֱ��distribution, for example, of Old English, vernacular Latin and (to a lesser extent) British Celtic place-names across southern England suggests that most early medieval people were bi- or even tri-lingual. Fenland was no different.

As Oosthuizen points out, being able to speak several languages confers obvious advantages, widening opportunities for all manner of transactions. It’s highly probable that the inhabitants of Walsoken and Chatteris, to name just two fenland villages, would have spoken both Old English and another language, switching from one to the other according to interlocutor and topic.

Basing her arguments on pollen analysis, archaeological evidence, the longevity over almost 1,500 years of rights of common pasture in the fen, and the etymology of place names, (and the absence of evidence to the contrary), Oosthuizen proposes that new arrivals were assimilated within the indigenous Romano-British communities, sharing livelihoods within the same landscape, their various languages and cultures mingling and merging.

̽��ֱ��Anglo-Saxon Fenland paints a portrait of communities whose agricultural economies were based on common rights in shared wetland resources that belonged to the whole of the small territories among which they were divided. Arrangements by which the landscape’s bounty was apportioned took account of the needs of both local communities and the land itself, breathing life into the adage that the old ways are often the best ways, based on the wisdom that comes with practical experience and knowledge passed down from one’s elders.

Dairy cattle, for example, were allowed first access to spring pasture; as providers of milk their needs for optimum nutrition were greatest. On the other hand, cattle were barred from land at times when their hooves would damage the soil structure vital to its long-term health.

Oosthuizen writes: “Timetabling [grazing by the dairy herd] was focused on sub-dividing the fens to allow for their rotation for different uses in different months, whose objectives were to maintain the quality of the grazing, to sustain the health of the herd, to ensure equitable exploitation among right holders, to maximise production, and to assure the long term sustainability of fen pastures.”

A similar checklist of priorities, Oosthuizen points out, underpins modern conservation advice on floodplain water meadows, which are best maintained on a regime that includes annual mowing, use of livestock from August to keep the grass short, maintenance of boundaries, clearing of watercourses, and control of invasive weeds.

There is abundant evidence - in place names, ditches and banks, land- and water-management practices, and (once they began) records of agreements based on centuries-old tried-and-tested farming methods - that people managed the landscape not just to meet their immediate needs but to assure the long-term sustainability of the wetland resources on which their livelihoods depended.

Detail of a late 16th century copy of an earlier map, possibly medieval in origin. It shows the area around Four Gotes in Tydd St Giles, near Wisbech. (Courtesy of Wisbech & Fenland Museum)

Fen dwellers made incremental adjustments to the ways in which they collectively exploited and safeguarded the fenland’s natural resources, adapting to water levels that slowly rose as a result of climate change.

In the undrained fen, water was both friend and foe. Serious flooding was a destructive force. Yet periodic (but relatively brief) seasonal inundation of pasture land produces grass not just for grazing but also to make the nutritious hay on which cattle thrived during the winters. Perhaps as early as 650, fen communities were already digging ditches to redirect excess water away from their pastures.

In 1618, the commoners at Cottenham described how the right amount of flooding, at the right time, could produce the white fodder which the cattle like best and that “those grounds that lie lowest, and are oftenest and longest overflown in the winter season are the most fertile grounds and yield the best yearly value”.

Detailed knowledge of the varying characteristics that depended on the degree of wetness in each part of the fenland enabled fen-dwellers to maximise its productivity through seasons wet and dry, and makes the most of opportunities for hunting, trapping and fishing - wildfowl and eels for the pot.

With ̽��ֱ��Anglo-Saxon Fenland Oosthuizen reveals a society whose origins could be found in prehistoric Britain, which had evolved through the four centuries of Roman administrations, and continued to develop thereafter. ̽��ֱ��rich and complex history of the fen region shows, she argues, a traditional social order evolving, adapting and innovating in response to changing times.

In piecing together evidence from a wide range of sources, she illuminates how early medieval communities interacted with each other, with newcomers, and – especially – how those relationships were intertwined with their management of the pastoral landscapes on which their livelihoods depended.

̽��ֱ��Anglo-Saxon Fenland by Susan Oosthuizen is published by Windgather Press.

What was life in the fens like in the period known as the dark ages? Archaeologist Susan Oosthuizen revisits the history of an iconic wetland in the light of fresh evidence and paints a compelling portrait of communities in tune with their changeable environment. In doing so, she makes an important contribution to a wider understanding of early medieval landscapes.

̽��ֱ��evidence from fenland shows that newcomers were assimilated into late British communities; there was no displacement of populations nor establishment of separate communities.

Susan Oosthuizen

Cattle grazing in the River Ouse water meadows south of Ely

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Words for mud and mountain, wind and wetland: answers on a postcard, please

amb206 — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 13:30:00 +0000

For more than a decade Dr Robert Macfarlane has collected endangered words. Not just any words but words for aspects of landscape – its contours, its feel underfoot, its weathers and moods – made fragile by the passing of time and the changing of practices. Lists of these words, organised into themed glossaries, form the backbone of his latest book Landmarks.

In the text that accompanies his word lists, Macfarlane travels from the peat bogs of the Isle of Lewis to the flatlands of the Cambridgeshire fens in search of hidden lexical treasure. Flying into Stornoway over the brown moorland expanses of Lewis, he overhears a couple joking that they have come to see nothing. Half an hour later, he’s talking to a Lewisian friend who is compiling a glossary of Gaelic peat-language: it encompasses 120 terms.

When Macfarlane wrote an article for the Guardian Review about Landmarks, he added a postscript inviting readers to send him postcards noting their words for landscape. He wasn’t sure whether people still sent postcards. They do. ̽��ֱ��cards reproduced here (with permission from senders) are just a few of the dozens that have found their way into Macfarlane’s pigeon hole at Emmanuel College.

View postcards on Flickr

A ‘dimple’, writes one correspondent, is Derbyshire for a pool in a wood or dell. ‘Geevy’, informs a card from Cornwall, is a mixture of mist and drizzle – “as in it’s a geevy old day”. A Radnorshire word for molehill is ‘unty-tump’. Written on the back of a postcard of the Cairngorms is: “eddish = 2nd crop of hay.” ‘Sprittin’ is “sprouting as in the hawthorn’s sprittin, spring’s on its way.”

John Birkett, who as a boy helped on farms in Cheshire, sent a handwritten list of more than 50 terms, subdivided and graded by x (possibly in use), xx (known to me as a lad) and xxx (known by my father in the 1920s). ‘Puthery’, meaning very humid, is “still used naturally by wife and I”. A cowshed is always a ‘shippon’: the word cowshed was never used as “it was considered very infra dig – fit only for those in the despised south”.

Each day brings more post. ̽��ֱ��latest is a letter from Mary West who lives in Westhorpe in Nottinghamshire. She writes to offer Macfarlane a large collection of words and sayings, recorded on index cards. She has been gathering words relating to the countryside for 40 years. “I’ve always collected things and I love words,” she says. “I’ve made around 25 scrap books about the lovely village where I live.”

Though unable to respond personally, Macfarlane would like to thank all those who sent not just words but poems and stories. They include writers and academics, a Jungian analyst, a ‘lollipop man’ and a lady in Lancashire aged 96. Their messages suggest how much their words for landscape mean to them. Recording and archiving their contributions will be a project in its own right.

Macfarlane would like more people to write to him with their word-gifts. Contributors should restrict their offerings to words that describe aspects of the landscapes of Britain and Ireland (names for places but no place-names, please), and could come from any of the many languages, dialects and sub-dialects of these islands, from Gaelic to Welsh, Shetlandic to Jérriais.

‘Dumberdash’ is an old Cheshire term for a short but violent storm. A ‘lumpenhole’ is a deep trench for fluid farmyard waste. The man who remembers these words is among the scores of people who have written to Dr Robert Macfarlane in response to his latest book, Landmarks.

A cowshed was always a shippon. Cowshed was considered very infra dig – fit only for those in the despised south.

Retired farmer, Cheshire

Ways to get involved and contribute more words

Send postcards to: Dr Robert Macfarlane, Emmanuel College, St Andrews Street, Cambridge CB2 3AP.

Send tweets using #livinglanguage

Leave comments in the section below.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Views of the landscape

amb206 — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��second half of the18th century witnessed a revolution in agriculture driven by individuals who saw in the emerging scientific methods of producing food the means of securing wealth for themselves and prosperity for the nation. ̽��ֱ��contemporary sources that tell the story of these improvements in farming provide a window on how people saw the land in its role as a provider, and how they worked with the resources that nature offered on a practical level, putting into motion the practices developed through careful experimentation.

A close reading of these publications and archival materials reveals a complex discourse which drew on artistic and literary traditions as well as the developing field of agricultural improvements. This overlap in the perceptions of land and landscape, how painterly interpretations of the countryside were embedded into at least some of the literature of agricultural improvement, represents one of the strands of my current research as a visiting scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS).

On Monday, 20 May I will be talking about, ‘Seeing with words: tours, surveys and agricultural improvement in Britain, c 1770–c 1820’, in a presentation that will discuss how one man in particular – Arthur Young - embodied this blurring of boundaries. In an informal presentation intended to outline my preliminary thoughts on the topic, I will encourage my audience to drop the divides between disciplines and explore, through Young and his writing, the creative links which have come to inform our own way of seeing landscape.

̽��ֱ��principal motor of agricultural improvement was the enclosure of common and waste lands, which abolished traditional common rights and transferred the land to private ownership. Although enclosure of common and waste lands had started much earlier, the second half of the 18th century saw a much more concentrated effort in that direction. In particular, parliamentary acts were increasingly used to facilitate quicker and more extensive enclosure. By the end of George III’s reign some six million acres had been transferred from waste or common land to privately owned enclosures.

̽��ֱ��energetic traveller and commentator Arthur Young (1741-1820) is remembered as a promoter of enclosure and experimental agriculture as the means of improved farming. He was a prolific writer and tireless promoter of agricultural improvement, editor of the Annals of Agriculture between 1784 and 1809, secretary to the Board of Agriculture from its foundation in 1793 to his death, and centre of an international corresponding network that included Sir Joseph Banks, George Washington, the radical chemist Joseph Priestley, the Irish chemist and mineralogist Richard Kirwan, and a number of improving aristocrats in France, Poland and Russia. These letters reveal that agricultural advances were at the top of the agenda in circles that went far beyond that of farmers and landowners.

An easily accessible compilation of Young’s prodigious output is GE Mingay’s Arthur Young and His Times (1975). But even a most thorough perusal of that book, with its selection of farm accounts and experimental observations collated by Young, the economic aspects of farming and the political and social importance of agriculture, does not prepare the reader for the sort of dizzily romantic writing of which Young is capable.

Below is an extract from Six Months Tour Through the North of England in which Young, the man who elsewhere extolls the use of root vegetables and deep ploughing to enhance productivity, takes the reader deep into the intoxicating landscape of an English paradise.

We had not travelled many miles over the moors, before a most enchanting landscape, as if dropt from heaven in the midst of this wild desart, at once blessed our eyes. In ascending a very steep rocky hill, we were obliged to alight and lead our horses; nor was it without some difficulty that we broke through a shrubby steep of thorns, briars, and other underwood; but when it was effected we found ourselves at the brink of a precipice with a sudden and unexpected view before our eyes of a scene more enticingly pleasing than fancy can paint. Would to heaven I could unite in one sketch the cheerfulness of Zuccarelli with the gloomy terrors of Pousin, the glowing brilliancy of Claud, with the romantic wildness of Salvator Rosa. Even with such powers it would be difficult to sketch the view which at once broke upon our ravished eyes.

Incircled by a round of black mountains, we beheld a valley which from its peculiar beauty, one would have taken for the favourite spot of nature, a sample of terrestrial paradise. Half way up the hills in front many rugged and bold projecting rocks discovered their bare points among thick woods which hung almost perpendicular over a deep precipice. In the dark bosom of these rocky shades a cascade glittering in the sun, pours as is from a hollow of the rock, and at its foot forms an irregular bason prettily tufted with wood, from whence it flows in a calm tranquil stream around this small, but beautiful vale, losing itself among rocks in a most romantic manner. Within the banks of this elysian stream, the ground is most sweetly varied in waving slopes and dales, forming five or six grass inclosures of a verdure beautiful as painting can express. Several spreading tress scattered about the edges of these gentle hills have a most charming effect in letting the green slopes illumined by the sun, be seen through their branches; one might almost call it, the clear obscure of nature.

It’s certainly a far cry from Country Life or Farmers Weekly. In reading these words today, part of our surprise that a man devoted to the improvement of agriculture should write such heady prose arises from received notions of the incompatibility of a more utilitarian view of the land and one centred on its aesthetic qualities. Our distinction between nature and culture compartmentalises art from science, fact from feeling. So historians who deal with Young have tended to concentrate on his economics rather than his aesthetics, on his taste for experiment rather than his experiments with taste. Dismissed as outdated flights of fancy, an important aspect of Young's writing has been lost to modern audiences.

To understand Young’s (to us) overblown allusions to the charm and drama of the landscape it is necessary to bring to mind the cult of the picturesque – a gentler precursor to the romanticism of the later 18th and early 19th centuries and a notion rooted in a sensibility to aesthetic values. In a like manner, much of the scholarship on the picturesque and the place of landscape within it assumes a fundamental antagonism between the dictates of aesthetic sensibility and those of hard nosed utility, a dichotomy that we have come to know as the ‘two cultures’ – the humanities and the sciences. I argue that the distinction we assume between what is practical and what is aesthetically pleasing is not so clear cut.

It is significant that Young’s most popular published works – accounts of extensive tours undertaken in England, Wales, Ireland, France, Italy and Spain in the 1770s and 1780s – are as full of the picturesque as they are of the utilitarian. In his Annals of Agriculture, too, where one might have expected a more focused attention on the practical and useful, Young continued to offer his own general views of various farming regions that included attention to the aesthetics of landscape. In the same forum, Young also published a series of letters by Thomas Ruggles on ‘Picturesque farming’ in which the useful improvement of farming was pursued alongside its aesthetic melioration, which meant applying the principles of scenic beauty so a to render a view of the farm picturesque through the use of trees, hedges and other such features.

Moreover, while Young certainly resisted the more dogmatic attempts to see landscape only according to the rules of painting, there are clear and important parallels between the way Young structured his writing about the aesthetic qualities of landscape and the way in which landscape painters depicted their scenes visually. It is as if Young was painting with words. In this way, Young takes on the formal rules of William Gilpin, a major theorist of the picturesque aesthetic, but resists his rejection, itself never complete, of the “plough and the spade”.

My research involves parallel studies of literature and history of art with particular attention to ways in which they related epistemologically, socially and discursively. Hilly Landscape, the painting by Charles Towne reproduced here by kind permission of the Fitzwilliam Museum, follows the basic pattern employed by the classical landscape artist, Claude Lorrain. Firstly, the whole view is taken from a high vantage point which allows a distant horizon to be seen even though middle ground between the viewpoint and that horizon can rise up. This prospect gives the whole space a more enclosed frame, albeit leaving the suggestion that there is something beyond which the eye cannot see.

Towne thus achieves the impression of incredible depth and distance associated with Claude. As Richard Wilson (1714-1782), the Welsh landscape painter known as ‘the English Claude’, noted ‘you may walk in Claude’s pictures’. In Towne’s painting this is given added emphasis by the wagon and horse descending into the valley below; our eyes move with the travellers in the painting.

While differing in detail, the passage from Young’s Six Months Tour reproduced above certainly shares a lot of the features found in Hilly Landscape. Whatever we make of the way in which Young situated taste and utility, the two were closely connected. They can, in some respects, be seen as expressions of a single way of seeing that, while different in some respects, shared so many features as to allow slippage from the one to the other.

This could, of course, be something peculiar to Young. William Marshall (1745-1818), a rival of Arthur Young who was equally committed to agricultural improvement, dismissed Young’s ramblings as a confused and confusing hotchpotch of ‘paintings, pigs, and picturesque views’. But whereas Young travelled rapidly through the country to build up his picture of agriculture, Marshall advocated his own method of residing in the region under survey for lengthy periods of time. In other words, his way of seeing was more introverted and perhaps excluded those prospect views that Young shared with some landscape painters.

̽��ֱ��same prospect view, moreover, is embedded in Young’s method of noting the agricultural practices of the regions he visited. When he himself farmed, he developed a system of conducting and recording experiments which moved from the practical business of husbandry to the economic costs and benefits that variations of these practices entailed. This approach was applied in his Tours and became also the model for the later Board of Agriculture’s County Surveys. While I don’t want to push this notion too far, it seems that oscillation between the physical and economic aspects of farming has its correspondence in the alternation between light and dark which allows a view of scenic beauty to become visible. In Young’s case, though, what becomes visible is the view of the farm not as a household, as had been very much the case earlier in the 18th century, but as an integrated unit of production. Where the landscape painter brought beauty into view, Young brought utility into view.

This combination of painterly and scientific ways of seeing, I suggest, offered what is possibly one of the first views of the capitalist economy. Whereas economic tracts from the 17th century to the first decade of the 19th offer ‘snapshot’ accounts of various economic subjects from balance of payments and trade to land and rent, money, population and taxation, there is no clear idea that something as unified as ‘an economy’ was perceived to exist. ̽��ֱ��compositional elements were there, but there was no picture. They lacked the sort of perspectives that made landscape art possible. With Young, who very clearly had a sophisticated sense of the aesthetic and a commitment to what he saw as economically and socially useful improvements, this changes.

Just why Young wrote like he did is, of course, explainable on various fronts. Not least is Young’s personal combination of aesthetics and practical improvement. But Young was by no means alone in this. Several writers of the Board of Agriculture’s County Reports, for example, also moved quite easily from aesthetic to practical concerns. Even William Marshall published works on gardening and the aesthetic improvement of estates. Moreover, the genre of the Tour was itself becoming more popular. Tourists to the Lake District, North Wales and the Scottish Highlands became increasingly common, and so too did travel guides. A sign, perhaps, of the structural changes occurring in both the economy and society, touring and travel literature, of which Young was a pioneer, gave wider currency to the ways of seeing that Young deployed; one of the most popular travel guides on the period, Thomas West’s Guide to the Lake District, even quoted Young at length. More tellingly, though, Young’s mixing of taste with utility would have rendered him a more reliable observer, a more trustworthy authority.

Displaying all the sensibilities of taste that marked a cultured gentleman of the period would give credibility and trustworthiness to what were, as far as his agricultural observations went, radical and often destabilising opinions. In nearly every account of the aesthetic qualities of natural landscapes that Young offered, for example, enclosed lands are present. That such a renowned theorist of aesthetics as Edmund Burke could write to Young asking for practical advice on farming is suggestive in this respect. By combining a radical agenda for improvement with a sense of aesthetic taste, Young secured a more receptive audience ready to see on the farm what they saw in the landscape.

Simon Nightingale will be talking about ‘Seeing with words: tours, surveys and agricultural improvement in Britain, c.1770–c.1820’ on Monday, 20 May, 1pm, at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge. All welcome.

For more information on this story contact Alex Buxton, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Communications Office, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673

In a talk on Monday (20 May 2013) Dr Simon Nightingale will explore how painterly interpretations of the countryside were embedded into the literature of agricultural improvement in a way that might surprise modern readers.

Dismissed as outdated flights of fancy, an important aspect of Young's writing has been lost to modern audiences.

Dr Simon Nightingale

Charles Towne, Hilly Landscape, Oil on canvas, 38.7cm x 51.1cm (detail)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

After the flood: harnessing the power of mud

hps25 — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 12:46:44 +0000

Sixty years ago tonight, a storm surge in the North Sea caused catastrophic flooding on the coast of eastern England. ̽��ֱ��‘big flood’ of 1953 inundated more than 65,000 hectares of land, damaged 24,000 houses and around 200 important industrial premises, resulting in 307 deaths in the immediate flooding phase.

In the aftermath, sea defences were developed and major protection schemes were implemented – the eventual construction of the Thames Barrier being the most conspicuous example. Warning services and emergency responses to flooding became coordinated at a national level, something which hadn’t existed in 1953.

But many of these reinforcements will reach the end of their design life in the next decade. Experts analysing storm surge height and wave activity believe the flood to be a once every 50 year event – it will happen again, they say, it is only a question of when.

Environmental changes and possible sea-level rises hadn’t been properly anticipated when protection schemes commenced, and UK coastal populations have risen by up to 90% in certain areas since 1953 – many designated as high flood risk.

“Such contexts call for more research into complexities of storm surge dynamics, strengthening of coastal planning policy and a more nuanced approach to coastal engineering,” said Dr Tom Spencer, Director of the Cambridge Coastal Research Unit (CCRU) from the Department of Geography.

̽��ֱ��CCRU are currently researching the effectiveness of the natural flood defences offered by coastal ecosystems such as salt marshes and mud flats. They suggest a ‘hybrid engineering’ approach, combining sea walls with natural ecosystems. Such ecosystems not only provide flood protection but store carbon, filter pollutants and increase biodiversity. Over recent years, these important habitats that have become “squeezed out” by rising sea levels and hard sea defences.

̽��ֱ��research is part of a six year programme involving 14 other institutions, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. ̽��ֱ��teams are focusing on the marshlands of the Essex coast and Morecambe Bay.

“We already know that some of the Essex marshes regularly reduce the energy of waves by up to 90% over a distance of 80 metres or so,” said Dr Iris Möller, Lecturer in Physical Geography at Fitzwilliam College and co-investigator on the project.

“Hard defences are expensive and doomed to fail or incur ever-increasing costs. A key priority is the need to restore a natural coastal ‘buffer’ zone, free from human occupation and compatible with the ‘inbuilt’ ability of the coast to respond dynamically to environmental change – such as sea level rise or more frequent storms.”

̽��ֱ��researchers say they now have the technology to accurately measure wave depth and energy across marshes and mud flats, providing engineers and policy makers with the information they need to show the effectiveness of ecosystem-inclusive sea defence systems.

By installing a total of 42 wave recording devices at marshes in Essex and Morecambe Bay, with measurements controlled by solar-powered data logging systems, the team can track wave level and pressure variations as water moves across mud and vegetation. This information is continuously streamed back to Cambridge via mobile phone networks.

̽��ֱ��team are finding that the mud and plants of the marshes naturally dissipate the ferocity of waves from storms, whereas just seawalls can alter the shape of the coast artificially, causing greater erosion through energy redistribution.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge wave research is part of the Coastal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Sustainability project, looking at the range of benefits natural ecosystems can provide – from carbon stores to pollution sinks as well as wave buffers – and how they can integrate with traditional flooding engineering.

“It is important to understand the value of varied habitats that make up the landscape of the UK,” said Professor David Paterson, project leader from the ̽��ֱ�� of St. Andrews. “Coastal systems are some of the most sensitive to pressures of climate change”.

Adds Spencer: “It’s vital that we also investigate the role of ecosystems in coastal risk reduction and how, through ‘hybrid engineering’, both types of approach to coastal defence can be brought together to reduce risks and provide a long-term and robust response to the threat of catastrophic coastal flooding.”

On the 60th Anniversary of the ‘big flood’ that devastated the coastline of eastern England, new research shows that integrating ‘natural’ sea defences such as salt marshes with sea walls is a more sustainable and effective method of flood prevention.

Both types of approach to coastal defence can be brought together to reduce risks and provide a long-term and robust response to the threat of catastrophic coastal flooding.

Tom Spencer

Dr Iris Moller

Mudflat and marsh at Abbots Hall, Essex

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Capturing urban conflict: beyond the newsreel

bjb42 — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:24:14 +0000

Jerusalem, Belfast, Beirut, Mostar – Mention these cities to most people and they will conjure scenes of bullet-sprayed walls, barbed wire fences and militarized zones, the images that appear on TV screens around the world. But some people will think just one word – home. Cities of conflict and the boundaries within them are not just defined by the politics and violence of the moment, but also by the daily throng of the population as they go about their lives: shopping, schooling, socialising and so on.

You can listen to a podcast on the research here:

̽��ֱ��Capturing Urban Conflicts exhibition, which runs from 19 – 23 October in Cambridge and then from 3 – 5 November in London as part of the ESRC’s ‘Festival of Social Sciences’, was developed by the Conflict in Cities team at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Using photo-essays and a fresh cartographic approach to go beyond the media snapshots of these cities, the exhibition gives people a sense of life in areas of urban conflict, and how areas of conflict are constantly shifting.

“We created a series of unique maps that show the spectrum of not just boundaries, but also transitional and mixed spaces that exist within contested cities”, says Dr Wendy Pullan, Principal Investigator on Conflict in Cities, “This exhibition challenges the perception of these cities often generated by the media, using maps and photography to provide a window on life in the conflict areas, highlighting not just the resilience but, sometimes, even vibrancy.”

Based in the Department of Architecture, the research has involved comparative mapping of nine divided cities at different stages of their transition through conflict, focusing on the two key cities of Belfast and Jerusalem. Usually, maps of these cities don’t display contested areas and flash-points, but this is what the team focused on. ̽��ֱ��exhibition features a special section of maps devoted to Jerusalem.

“We have drawn all the maps in the same hand using the same graphic conventions to allow for proper comparison, which hasn’t been done before” says Pullan. “Details in the divisions in many of these cities are not properly mapped. One reason is that they change so frequently, but it is also very often extremely politically charged.”

“A case in point is Jerusalem. We produced two different maps showing how Israel sees the city, and how Palestine sees it – they obviously don’t match and we are not trying to make them, but if you compare the two, by the same hand at the same scale, you get a better picture of where the divisions are, how they are fluctuating, and the patterns that emerge.”

̽��ֱ��team look at the range of interaction within the zones where conflicting areas meet, what they refer to as the ‘spectrum of engagement’. Of course this can be antagonistic, but it can also be casual and generous interaction between ostensibly hostile factions. “Cities don’t function like states,” says Pullan, “and urban areas that have national frontiers running through them are the most volatile, but can also lead the way in demonstrating how conflict can be resisted, and even potentially absorbed, through the environment people create in their quest to live as best they can.”

An example is the neighbourhood of French Hill in Jerusalem. A settlement for Israeli Jews, in what is a fairly recent phenomenon some Palestinians have been buying houses and renting flats there. “French Hill is near the university and Hadasa hospital, the housing and municipal services are so much better” says Pullan. “We did some research on Palestinians in the neighbourhood, even checking names on mailboxes, as there are just no statistics around this at the moment. A few people voiced the idea that this is a type of re-colonisation, but others want to be quiet about it and get on with their lives.”

It can be easy to view conflict as simply two states – war and peace – but all these urban areas are in an in-between state, and in this landscape the smallest presentation decisions, such as what colour you paint your door, can become highly value-laden. Street art takes on huge political significance, and the team found that many of the cities actually reference each other, defining themselves as ‘divided cities’ and showing solidarity with other urban areas.

“Many people tell us ‘you can’t compare us with anywhere else’, conflict is such a strong part of a divided city’s identity,” says Pullan, “but the more politically aware citizens often notice comparisons with other cities, and referenced this on the streets.” This is particularly strong with regard to Belfast and Jerusalem: from murals of the Jerusalem separation barrier on the Falls Road in Belfast, to graffiti in East Jerusalem imploring passers-by to ‘learn from Northern Ireland’.

Physical landmarks of conflict can end up frozen for memorial purposes, and this identification of a city as conflicted even extends to tourism in some instances. “Conflict tourism is a going concern, there’s a group of former prisoners who guide tours in Belfast for example” says Pullan. “Tourism is a huge battleground in Jerusalem of course, people use it to legitimise their own causes. Berlin is an interesting example not just of a city that has emerged from its divided state in many ways, but for how much interest there is in recreating evidence of the divide, and how popular a tourist destination it is.”

“Urban populations are dramatically increasing. Cities are full of diversity by their very nature, which can create centres of culture and learning. However, as contact zones between ethnic, political and class groups, and strategic centres of power, they may also be arenas of dissent.”

“By 2030, 92.2% of Britons are expected be living in urban areas and, as was startlingly proved in London earlier in the year, we are far from immune to explosions of urban conflict. We hope this exhibition reveals how inhabitants of contested cities survive, resist, dominate, cope, ignore and imagine their fraught existences.”

Capturing Urban Conflict can be seen at the Department of Architecture in Cambridge between 19 – 23 October as part of the Festival of Ideas, then at the Department of Architecture at London Metropolitan ̽��ֱ�� between 3 – 5 November as part of the ESRC’s Festival of Social Sciences.

A new exhibition unveils the work of a unique study into some of the most bitterly divided cities in the world, such as Jerusalem and Belfast, showing how daily life adapts to, defines and defies boundaries in spaces of urban conflict.

Cities don’t function like states, and urban areas that have national frontiers running through them are the most volatile, but can also lead the way in demonstrating how conflict can be resisted.

Dr Wendy Pullan

Conflict in Cities

Separation barrier in Jerusalem

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes