F E AT U R E By Kim Wilkie
Led by the land Kim Wilkie asks how we manage the land for soil, water and life, while still growing food and respecting the beauty, stories and character of the last 6,000 years
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very age is convinced that it faces the end of the world, but ours is more able to achieve it. On top of political and financial fragility, we have an environment pushed so far to extremes that the survival of most natural life is in the balance. Understandably in the climate crisis most attention has been focused on fossil fuels, but how we live in the wider landscape is also key. The vast majority of humans inhabit the temperate zones and in countries like the United Kingdom over 70 per cent of that land is farmed, with a further
13 per cent in forestry (DEFRA). The big question is how to manage the land for soil, water and life, while still growing food and respecting the beauty, stories and character of the last 6,000 years of settlement. The British and Irish Islands have a deep sediment of fossilised lives that makes the landscape hum. These lives have been intimately linked to the geology, climate and a spiritual resonance on the edge of the old human world. The easily sculpted sedimentary layers, low northern light and high rainfall have created a tradition of grass covered earth forms
that date back before the Bronze Age. Burial mounds, fortifications and ceremonial places have set a pattern of working with the land on a scale that has inspired, from Eggardon Hill to Portrack House (the location of the “Garden of Cosmic Speculation”) and Andy Goldsworthy. The great English designed landscapes of Claremont and Studley Royal are part of the tradition and much of our literature and art are bound up in the rolling forms of the land. From Spenser and Hardy to Ravilious and Sutherland, landscape – and the stories it tells – lie at the core of our culture.
1. Eggardon Hill, Dorset. © Kim Wilkie
2. Mountain road through fractured rock, 1940. © Graham Sutherland Private collection
In the United Kingdom over 70 per cent of land is farmed
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