Shaped in Britain: Landscape made me

Aged 4 to 7 years

My map

begins in a crescent with dog-walking

and garden race tracks,

cricket pitch and wrestling ring;

with hidden dens and

secret hedgerow paths,

leading to undiscovered lands

two houses up the road. 

 

Aged 8 to 13 years

We were not especially close in our younger years, there being some years’ difference in age, but my elder brother and I spent a lot of time together during holidays following his hobby, which was fossil collecting. I was useful to him as a carrier of samples, labels, bags and pens – and lunch.  He was useful to me, although I did not always appreciate it at the time, taking me to places and terrain I would not otherwise have encountered.

He taught me to “see” the ammonites, belemnites and gastropods which littered the broken shoreline; I imagined the Jurassic seas which spawned them; I wondered at the beauty and variety of form as we split open rock after rock; to scour every detail of the stones which formed the field walls as they and we snaked across the moors.

So in me grew a passion for the rugged coastline and dales of North Yorkshire, a tolerance for scuffed knees and aching rucksack-weary shoulders and a delight in discovering glimpses of the natural history of our land.

 

Aged 18 to 21 years

Spilling out of the train, we would set our sights on Jacob’s Ladder, yomping across the peatbogs of Kinder; revel in the limestone gorge and glowering gritstone of Winnatts Pass and Mam Tor; hike Helvellyn and scale Scafell .  Neither hail, nor snow, nor driving rain would deter us from these weekend forays.  New conquests made, “first ascents” and trig-point bagging, we would recount to each other our achievements over pints of beer before retiring, exhausted but supremely happy, to our tents, convinced that Everest base camp was within our grasp.

Solo expeditions followed, hitch-hiking round Scotland encountering the matchless beauty of Suilven and Canisp, majestic Glencoe of unimagined vastness, rough sea crossings to the magical islands of Orkney.

 

Maturing years

Tent-companioned, together we explored softer landscapes – bobbing dippered, ash-treed dales; shingle-shifting, reed-waving, creek-filling, shoreline-shaping Norfolk; island-hopping; mountain-skirting.

These landscapes, whose peopled past was and is my study, live and breathe through my being.  Each walk, each drive, each cycle ride, the shaping of the land calls out as I in turn ask questions of it.

 

Paul Middleton