Marshwood Vale: Guy Edwardes, photographer
This patchwork of fields, hedgerows and pockets of woodland in Dorset is often
partly concealed beneath a terrific dawn mist. The landscape is made up of
many farms and, due to its steep terrain, has changed little in the past few
decades. Long may it continue
Canals: Kevin Spacey, actor and director
Spacey hired a canal boat last year to cruise up and down the Kennet and Avon
canal, stopping off at every pub along the way.
“Boating on a canal is a great way to watch the world drift by, and it’s a lot
more relaxing – if a little faster perhaps – than travelling through
the streets of London. What better way is there to experience the
spectacular Avoncliff aqueduct in Wiltshire and the nature that surrounds
this man-made canal?
“The thing I love about the countryside is you never quite know what you’re
going to get.”
Brighton pier: Bill Bryson, writer
“Years ago, when I was new to Britain, I went with an English friend to
Brighton for the day and saw my first seaside pier. The idea of constructing
a runway to nowhere was one that would never have occurred to me. I asked
what they were for.
“ ‘Well, they let you walk out and see the sea,’ she explained. ‘You walk out
to the end and you are over the sea. It’s lovely.’ ‘Can you see coral
reefs and shipwrecks?’ I asked hopefully.
‘No, it’s just murky water. You take the air. It’s bracing.’ ‘And then what?’
‘You walk back and have whelks and stroll along the promenade and maybe ride
a donkey on the beach. Then you have an ice cream and get on the train and
go home.’ ‘And this is a fabulous day out?’ ‘Oh yes, it’s lovely. Especially
if it doesn’t rain.’
“I have since come to realise that she was right about everything but the
whelks. I have come to appreciate the things that make England what it is
are quite endearing and often admirable. The ability so gloriously evinced
in the seaside pier – to be magnificent while having no evident purpose – is
one of the qualities that set English icons apart and make them so
memorable.”
Wild flowers: Alan Titchmarsh, gardener and author
“I live in an old farmhouse surrounded by fields and woods, copses and
hedgerows, meadows and hawthorn-canopied bridleways, so it takes only a few
minutes before I am wading through wild flowers, and listening to birdsong.
I know some of the birds by name, but I am especially familiar with the
flowers. Birds are busy, demanding to be noticed, but flowers make no fuss,
except in the exuberance of their blossom. Dog’s mercury – hardly a flower
at all, just a modest green tassel – indicates that a particular patch of
woodland has been in existence since the Middle Ages. And by the river, the
bashful, nodding water avens rests with round-shouldered blooms of burnished
copper. I love their names – lady’s bedstraw and red campion, Queen Anne’s
lace and herb Paris – each one a link with countrymen of the past. In my
childhood in the Yorkshire Dales, Mum and I often went off in search of wild
flowers. I have some pressed flat in a rough album, their names added in a
spidery scrawl courtesy of nine-year-old fingers. Each one is a memory of a
moment in the summer of 1958 when they were plucked from Middleton Woods or
the bank of the River Wharfe. Fifty years on, they are a stirring reminder
of a time when life was beginning to reveal its riches, its complexities and
its heartbreaks.”
Marshlands: Richard Mabey, author
“They may seem the very negation of landscape. No elevations, no shadows and
no secret glades. The ground seems to have been scoured into a rumpled,
homogenous plain. But marshlands are more subtle than that. Resist the pull
of the horizon and shorten your focus. The homogeneity vanishes. There are
dark sedges, livid bog mosses, lustrous mist-green patches of reed, grass
tussocks, pools and inscrutable ribbons of vegetation. And this view is in
constant motion. Marshes are animated by wind like no other landscape. The
whole vocabulary of the marsh is about intimacy of movement: rustling,
gliding, quaking, shimmering. Marshlands are the stage for the great
principles that govern ecosystems: change, continuity and connectivity.
Marshes are agile and adaptive. They are about living in the present and
going with the flow.”
Orchards: Raymond Blanc, chef
“It’s easy for me to think of food when I consider the landscape of this, my
adopted country. But I also think of something that flourishes in the
gentle, moderate climate, something we have to tend for future generations:
I think of apples and orchards. For Shakespeare, orchards were to be admired
and enjoyed – something I have tried to recreate in the grounds of Le
Manoir. There, in the fold of hills that overlook the water meadows of the
Thames Valley, we have the remains of an old orchard. We have let the ground
under many of the trees revert to wild flowers and plants – snowdrops,
crocuses, fragrant bluebells. It’s glorious in every season. Apple-growing
is one of the things that England does best. And the simple act of choosing
an English apple is a vote for biodiversity, as well as the preservation of
our traditional landscape.”
Balcombe viaduct: Jon Snow, news presenter
“It was my earliest and dearest horizon, the distant construct that defined
where my world ended and the world beyond began. Across it belched the steam
of passing trains, together with the flickering lights of passenger traffic
that promised destinations I had never seen or imagined.
“For years, Balcombe viaduct, in the Sussex Weald, was beyond the point that
either my large-wheeled perambulator or my small legs could ever reach. It
wasn’t until I turned 9 or 10 that I – with my two brothers – first walked
all the way to the viaduct. Nearing it, its overwhelming scale filled us
with fear. Towering a hundred feet above us, the oval openings in the
brickwork of each arch were too high for us to clamber into. We counted the
37 massive arches and wondered how they could have been built as early as
1840 – with 11m bricks. Every now and then the shattering clatter of a train
above us would stir deeper fears. We never saw a soul there. It was our
private pyramid, our seventh wonder of the world. It was the backdrop to my
playing, my tricycling, my bicycling and my growing up. Somehow I imagined
that all children had a viaduct in their world.
“It was on the edge of my innocence, before I deserted it and found out what
lay beyond.”
Newlands Corner: Eric Clapton, musician
This area near Guildford reminds Clapton of day trips to the coast from his
childhood home in the Surrey village of Ripley.
“There is nothing better than leaving the suburbs of the town to gradually
climb up the winding road until you reach the top of the hill. As you come
over the crest, you are treated to one of the most beautiful sights known to
man – this man, anyway. It’s not grand, but the proportions are perfect: a
patchwork of fields and woods laid carefully over the gently undulating
North Downs.”
Icons of England is published on September 5 by Think Books in support of the
Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) at £20. To order a copy at the
BooksFirst price of £18 (inc p&p), call 0870 165 8585 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
