ABSTRACT

I knew my boundaries—the garden was ‘mine’, the hedges were ‘ours’—‘we’ cut them, the fields were our taken right to go into—they touched our hedges and the resident cows chewed them. By contrast the deserted railway line was a vegetated tangle of unknown ownership beyond the fields and was more problematic—‘was it safe? ... I could not be seen’. Beyond was the forest and sandstone ridge, a vista that belonged to me from my daily angle of vision sitting on the back door step, but was a place only once visited. To this day I do not know the actual size of this viewshed, the extent and quality of the tenant farmer’s land or the scale of the estate that it was situated in, or the most energy-efficient path to the nearest hamlet, and I often wonder if it would have made any difference if I had been an adult. What I am clear about is that what I understood and now describe as a home territory is a landscape where land-nature-culture and space coalesced into a heterogeneous whole that was coterminous with the context of observation and experience. (S. Hamilton, personal memories of a childhood landscape)