We Are the Children of Our Landscape

Consult the genius of the place in all;

That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;

Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,

Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;

Calls in the country, catches opening glades,

Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,

Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;

Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

Alexander Pope

I dreamed last night that we walked up to The Plot.

The vivid descriptions from the book melded seamlessly with my own memories of our car struggling up the hairpins of Sutton Bank, powered chiefly it seemed by the willing-on and urging of three scruffy ginger-topped kids, our freckly legs sticking the hot vinyl seats of the Rover.

I'm not sure whether I've walked there or not. We knew our OS symbols, might have thought the chapel, the drover's road, the fort, the observatory would make some for interesting stopping points. We also knew how to read the contours, and that might have deterred us from the climb. The picnic spot along the ridge from the odd short-tailed white horse would perhaps have been a more likely stopping point.

I dreamed that we walked to the chapel along the drover's lane. It was spring, that time of year when the bright green bracken is just unfurling like a new baby's fingers. We walked inside and looked at the sculptures - and in my dream they were like the Broadbent Wings Over The World and the Gill reliefs on the London Underground Broadway building at St James's Park.

we sat in the lee of the wall and ate a picnic, drank tea from an old plaid-patterned flask my parents had in about 1972. We didn't say much - we didn't need to. I didn't know where we been, or where we were heading at the end of the walk. We turned our faces to the sunshine and enjoyed the perfect happiness of the moment.

We are the children of our landscape; It dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it."

Lawrence Durrell