Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I recently finished W. G. Hoskins's The Making of the English Landscape. Wonderful book - incredibly scholarly but written with a real sense of poetry too - in fact he quotes an awful lot of poetry. It ends with a heartfelt sort of paeon to how much of the landscape has been ruined, and was in the process of being ruined, when the first edition came out in the 1950s. In those days this was largely down to heavy industry and the takeover of much of rural England by the military because of the Cold War. Today most of the heavy industry is gone and the military presence greatly reduced, but the despoilation continues apace through road construction, low-density housing sprawl and commercial developments. Anyway it made me want to poke around the remains of the iron-age village at Chysauster in Cornwall and wander around Devon (which he pays particular attention to, having grown up here), trying to guess whether each ancient bank and hedge is the remains of mediaeval enclosures, the boundaries of a Saxon abbey or the estate of a wealthy Romano-British farmer. Intoxicating stuff.