ABSTRACT
That an idealised view of countryside should have emerged so rapidly from the turbulence of industrial revolution suggests that it was a natural and inevitable response to change. In a sense, of course, it was. The social and spatial disruption of urbanisation and the conditions of industrialism virtually guaranteed the emergence of sentimental and philosophical reverence for nature and rural life. Yet to become part of a civilisation’s value system, ideals must be nurtured and diffused by the culture in which they are born. For a society increasingly separated from direct contact with land, nature and rural community, the main inspiration for the idealisation of the countryside has thus been the images and values presented by literature and art and, more recently, by an increasingly dominant range of mass media. It is these which have nourished and reinforced the mental images of the countryside, which have fabricated the mythology and romanticism within which nostalgic sentiment has flourished, but which have also whet the public appetite for real experiences of nature and country life.
