ABSTRACT
The path and road network is a landscape structure which has materialised on the land, a rural landscape skeleton (Roupnel, 1931), but it is also the palpable evidence of our aspirations to see and visit the landscape and of our desire to build our own vision of the land. Hodology, the study of roads and pathways (Besse, 2009), examines our relationship with space, landscape and place through the essential act of travelling around. The relationships between paths and landscape bring all aspects of sustainable development into play: the technical and economic constraints on agriculture; types of management; social demand for access to rural landscapes; and the ecological need for green infrastructures and refuges for biodiversity. The articulation between path and landscape operates on two levels, on a network level with paths as a way of accessing the landscape, and on an object level because paths are landscapes in themselves.
