Country Diary: Wenlock Edge

As I look down on the countryside from an airplane - something I usually curse for their noise and pollution - the landscapes blend senselessly one into another. Flying creates a sort of topographical detachment; it's about being literally an outsider. The pattern of fields seems so smooth and tight - somewhere between clingfilm and Botox. It's a smoothing out or a lamination of the land.

It all looks too orderly: a kind of greedy appropriation of the land with all the wild bits appearing as unshaved, rude tufts bristling at the margins of organized systems of fields. This all seems to have a narcissistic quality. This self-satisfied, self-serving landscape, all too willing to barge out the wild and turn it back on the curses and blessings of its history, evokes rebellion. It is too easy to ignore that this land is itself formed by rebellion.

This is a contested landscape in which the assertion of order is nowhere near as confident as it appears. Take the simple matter of a hedge. There's a hedge outside Much Wenlock which has divided two large fields for a hundred years or more and now cuts across what was once a racecourse. The landowner has applied to grub it up. Locals are suspicious that even though planning permission has been recently denied, the chances are the field will eventually become building development. Opposition is mounting and so far the hedge has been saved.

But this kind of conflict is commonplace and a consequence of the changing economic and social pressures which shape the landscape. There's a story in to every hedge, every field, every remaining tuft of wood or scrub, and order itself is a constant rebellion against a rebelling Nature.