A genial hearth, a hospitable board,
And a refined rusticity. William Wordsworth
The dead level of provincial existence. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
The mean streets of Windley were soon left far behind and they found themselves journeying along a sunlit, winding road, bordered with hedges of hawthorn, holly and briar, past rich, brown fields of standing corn, shimming with gleams of gold, past apple-orchards where bending boughs were heavily loaded with mellow fruits exhaling fragrant odours, through the cool shades of lofty avenues of venerable oaks, whose overarched and interlacing branches formed a roof of green, gilt and illuminated with quivering spots and shafts of sunlight that filtered through the trembling leaves; over old mossy stone bridges, spanning limpid streams that duplicated the blue sky and the fleecy clouds … Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in chose to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees – willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores were mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of ’coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men p1
More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal features as alps go; heart- and sky-piercing snow-veined grey colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
The British countryside holds a special place in the hearts of the nation. Yet only 18% of the population lives in the country. Land of Hope & Glory: British Country Life I, BBC 2016
The countryside is under threat from urban values. ibid.
For almost a hundred and twenty years Country Life magazine has been inspiring to capture the elusive soul of the British countryside. Land of Hope and Glory: British Country Life II
From the Green and Pleasant land of William Blake’s Jerusalem to the hills and glens and flower of Scotland, it is to nature we turn when we celebrate who we are. Land of Hope and Glory: British Country Life III
He managed to combine an enthusiasm for modernism with a love of the countryside. This Green and Pleasant Land: The Story of British Landscape Painting, BBC 2011
For what were all these country patriots born?
To hunt, and vote, and raise the price of corn? Lord Byron
The story of the countryside is essentially one of class … Who owns the land? What do they do with the land? Mark Thomas Comedy Product special: Thomas Country, Channel 4 1999
Stroke a horse, shoot something, that kind of thing. ibid.
We pay for this destruction, and we pay for being excluded from it. ibid.
The National Farmers Union actually are now lobbying to ban subversive activities such as kite-flying and picnicking. ibid
Not the guardians of the land. ibid.
Poor old Camberwick Greenbelt. All the lovely old English fields have been replaced by lovely old imitation English houses. Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been trumped on? Spitting Image s5e1, Nick Ridley with dumpster, ITV 1988
Bruce Chatwin was a legendary adventurer and writer who died in 1989. Filmmaker Werner Herzog collaborated with Chatwin in the last years of his life. This film follows Herzog on a series of encounters inspired by Chatwin’s travels. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, Werner Herzog, BBC 2019
1977: In Patagonia … ‘The Brontosaurus, I learned, was an animal that had drowned in the flood, being too big for Noah to ship aboard the Ark.’ ibid. Chatwin
Llanthony Priory, Wales: The landscape around here became one of the essential locations where he would find his inner balance. ibid.