{"id":234,"date":"2008-08-04T00:26:20","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T07:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/?p=234"},"modified":"2009-01-16T11:46:27","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T11:46:27","slug":"an-unaltered-landscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/08\/04\/an-unaltered-landscape\/","title":{"rendered":"AN UNALTERED LANDSCAPE"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not often that you come across a landscape, urban or rural, that is virtually unchanged in half a century.<\/span><\/p>\n

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On driving from Malham to Arncliffe, a road which cuts through the picturesque limestone landscape of the South Pennines in the Yorkshire Moors, I came across Les and Doreen Barnett sat on deck chairs looking out over the hills while enjoying a sandwich and flask of tea. Les, who is founder and president of both the\u00c2\u00a0Bradford Urban Wildlife Group and\u00c2\u00a0Bradford Botany Group<\/a>, told me that he and Doreen had been coming to admire this view for nearly 50 years. In that time, all that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s changed is a new tractor on the farm and the\u00c2\u00a0unwelcome arrival of several roadside salt bins. Traffic is heavier at the weekends, so they only come on a weekday morning.<\/span><\/p>\n

As W.G.Hoskins<\/a> writes in his classic text The Making of the English Landscape (1955), “not much of England, even in its more withdrawn, inhuman places, has escaped being altered by man in some subtle way or other, however untouched we fancy it is at first sight.”<\/p>\n

\"ccf18042008_00001\"<\/p>\n

Three influences shape landscape- geology, climate and mankind. The origins of the early industrial revolution are to be found in the South Penines, an area which takes in parts of Bradford, Calderdale, Craven and Kirklees in Yorkshire and Burnley, Oldham, Rochdale and Lancashire County Council. These places bear witness to one of the greatest leap forward man has ever made: the Industrial Revolution. This is a cultural landscape unique in England.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the 19th\u00c2\u00a0Century transformed the region – wool in Yorkshire, cotton in Lancashire, textile wealth that powered the Victorian Age and the British Empire – much of this area is still untouched. The Yorkshire Moors are steeply cut by wooded valleys and a patchwork of hamlets and fields. Acid soils on impervious gritstone rock make the moors a tough but beautiful natural environment. Below the rough grazing of the moor, a distinctive lattice of 18th\u00c2\u00a0century drystone walls mark out the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcin bye\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 land: winter pasture for lambing and summer moving meadows for silage and hay.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not often that you come across a landscape, urban or rural, that is virtually unchanged in half a century. On driving from Malham to Arncliffe, a road which cuts through the picturesque limestone landscape of the South Pennines in the Yorkshire Moors, I came across Les and Doreen Barnett sat on deck chairs looking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":235,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[27,26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":962,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions\/962"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}