Various: The English Landscape

By BARBARA HARRIS

England, as Bill Bryson points out in his introduction to this substantial book, has no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. On a world scale, its natural features scarcely register.

A modest little landscape in which some 50 million people live. That the countryside remains so diverse and so accessible, even under the pressure of a burgeoning population, is what makes it so special, says Bryson, who lived in England for more than two decades.

That, and the people who have shaped it, because, after all, most of the landscape is manmade.

"Virtually every corner of the English landscape has been owned and worked and cropped and sown for at least seven thousand years," he writes.

Rare too is that it's still a country where walkers can ramble over farmland and, in the middle of nowhere, discover another peculiarity of the English countryside - the folly. At Steeple Aston in Oxfordshire is a arched wall built in the 1700s for an aristocrat to gaze at from his breakfast table. In Wiltshire stands the even more ancient manmade creation of Silbury Hill, a 2ha, 40m-high mound with no known purpose.

Bryson lays the foundation for the many contributors to this hardback book, which was inspired after a study by the Countryside Commission that looked at the geography of the land, its use and the effects of historical and cultural influences.

A hard core of writers, including wildlife authority David Bellamy, authors Marina Warner and Anna Pavord and natural history writer Richard Mabey, describe areas for which they have a special affinity.

Instead of a small number of writers expounding at length, The English Landscape's use of many writers adds a richness to the mix.

It's a book that works on many levels, with superb photographs, good maps and writing that whets the appetite for more.

And though it's pricey, it will no doubt have wide appeal.

Southern Publishers Group
$99.95