ABSTRACT
This essay outlines Ruskin's wider contribution to ideas about protecting cultural landscape and its conservation, where his presence is still felt, from the influence of his ideas on the founders of the National Trust in the late-19th century, to his place in the Lake District's inscription as a World Heritage Cultural Landscape in 2017. It takes the lens of Michel Foucault's archaeology of perception to examine what makes up Ruskin's particular gaze, his construction of landscape viewing and meaning. Examining how his response to landscape evolved in his writing, alongside his formative ideas on protection of cultural heritage, it considers how his work cultivated a wider environmental and ethical awareness in his readers and successors, which resonates with today's thinking on cultural landscapes and environmental issues. The extract here from Ruskin's writing is from the ‘Moral of Landscape’ chapter in Modern Painters III where Ruskin reflects on and analyses his own landscape feeling.
