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In "Living with and Looking at Landscape," geographer and historian David Lowenthal states, "We need to sense landscape as abiding; our essential well-being depends on finding our surroundings more durable than ourselves" (648). Mark Roskill expounds on this notion, arguing,
Landscape is an extraordinarily important component of our concrete physical experiences in the world, the apprehension of things deriving from these experiences and our accompanying sense of place. It represents a shaping term in our conceptualization of what is "out there," and of human relationships as they intertwine and interact with that. (1)
The land, therefore, is a conduit for human epistemology, as well as a mirrored surface on which to reflect back societal and individual identities. Indeed, much ecocritical scholarship in the last twenty years has focused on establishing the relationship between the land and the people who inhabit it, glorify it, exploit it, and/or build cultures and heritages upon it. The land and humanity are intertwined in a complex symbiosis in which they inform and shape one another - the land reflects the people, and the people reflect the land.
For the people of England, the unique English geography, topography and weather provide a literal space to reify their distance from continental Europe, and, arguably, the rest of the world. As an island, the insularity created by being, in essence, "borderless" - non-adjacent to other countries and cultures - strengthens the sense of English landscape as fundamentally important to English identity. Inherent in the island geography and the topography of low-rolling English countryside is the temperate cloudiness that keeps the English land verdant and fertile. Lowenthal argues that the synthesis of England's unique characteristics has led to a notion of landscapeas-heritage that is "distinctively English. Nowhere else is landscape so freighted as legacy. Nowhere else does the very term transcend scenery and genres de vie to suggest quintessential national virtues" ("British Identity" 213). The idealized scenery that Lowenthal calls the "now hallowed visual cliche" of archetypal rural England lies in its visually cohesive and orderly "patchwork of meadow and pasture, hedgerows and copses, immaculate villages nestling among small tilled fields ... the English landscape is not natural but crafted, suffused with human as well as divine purpose" ("British Identity" 214-15). The landscape that...