Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity by Paul Readman (review)

Paul Readman's fascinating study Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity appears at a timely moment when questions about who the English believe themselves to be and how they understand their relationship to the other parts of the United Kingdom and to Europe are more keenly contested than ever. The book reveals how multiple factors involved in the construction of a complex sense of national identity in the long nineteenth century drew simultaneously on a deep sense of history and the rural past, and an awareness of England as an advanced, modern, and increasingly urban and democratic society. "The significance of the historical associations of nationally valued landscapes has been insufficiently appreciated" (6), Readman contends, and his purpose is to show the ways in which an understanding of these enriches our grasp of the "ideological heterogeneity" of conceptions of national identity that emerged in the period (15). The six landscapes he examines as case studies are arrestingly distinctive, escaping from the limitations of a popular rural southern version of Englishness and reflecting the importance of a variety of regional histories, urban as well as rural, in imagining collective identity.

In the first of its three sections, Storied Ground considers the territorial edges of England as represented by the cliffs of Dover and the Northumbrian border with Scotland. While Readman demonstrates the ways in which the cliffs have been understood as both literal and emblematic signs of English insularity and separation from the wider world, and reassuring markers of home for returning travellers and adventurers, his discussion of the nineteenth-century fascination with the turbulent history of the northern border suggests that this is a much more ambiguous boundary, an area "powerfully expressive of a particular Unionist-British variety of Englishness" (52–3). Residual evidence of the region's violent past not only contrasted with its peacefulness in the nineteenth century; it also appealed to contemporary "romantic and medievalist sensibilities" (60), which, influenced in part by Walter Scott's unionist sympathies, conferred associations of "nobility of thought and deed, chivalry, bravery and honour" on former combatants from both sides of the border (64). For Readman, the culmination of this process was reached in 1910 with the erection of a memorial at the site of the Battle of Flodden (1513) dedicated to "'the brave of both nations,'" thereby refiguring a former scene of bitterly antagonistic national memories as a place of mutual respect and honor (69). He likens this to the way parts of the Northumbrian border with Scotland are characterized by a degree of uncertainty or fluidity that, in contrast with the clear line of demarcation at Dover, blurs the sense of separation between the two countries and "calls into question totalising generalisations—or assumptions spoken or unspoken—about the unitary nature of English national identity" (75).

The impact of a growing recognition of specific landscapes as sites of national heritage worthy of preservation and with guaranteed rights of public access is another major focus in Storied Ground, and points forward to subsequent events such as the formation of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (1926), the Kinder Scout Trespass (1932), and the legislative provisions of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000). Underpinned by the extension of democratic rights to more citizens and expanding opportunities to travel, more visitors came to areas such as the Lake District, the New Forest, and the upper reaches of the Thames in search of recreation, the beauties of nature, and relief from urban work and life. Value was increasingly attached to such landscapes not only for the aesthetic pleasures they offered, but for their historical connections with earlier stages of English history. By the start of the twentieth century, for example, the Lake District "had become perhaps the pre-eminent national landscape, one whose heritage and associations supported mainstream understandings of progress and modernity" (97). Those associations were significantly shaped...